SVA Fail, but we think a good one

We didn't pass our SVA first time, but few do, and we are not despondent. The SVA process is a peculiar mix of the sensible and the mad. Before you can take your homebuilt car on the road you have to take it to a special VOSA test centre - we had to go to Southampton. Where some guy with a mixture of high tech, and frankly home brew test instruments takes a 3 hour look at your car. Yes 3 hours of prodding poking, brake testing, speedo checking etc. etc.

On the whole this is probably a good idea to prevent people putting complete 'heaps' on the road - but the lengths that they go to are sometimes OTT.

For example one of the eight or so failure items we had was the bottom of the suspension struts - where there are notches to insert the adjuster tool - these were considered dangerous edges - though frankly if you are hit by the car in this position whether it is a rounded edge or not seems a little superfluous.

It is also true to say that such things are not consistent between test centres, Westfield said they had only ever heard of a single other example of an inspector picking this up when I spoke to them this pm.

Here you can see the fix which involved some cut done 'wing piping' - a sort of rubber edging you can get from nfauto and a cable tie.



equally silly in my opinion was failing for the edge of the centre hub of the spare wheel no seriously! It's pretty hard to imagine an accident where you reverse at high speed into someone bending over so that they get a little rubber protection on that edge - which miraculously saves them.

other stuff that is silly is that they can't test a car which has a speedo drive from the front wheel and so want certain manufacturer certificates that may be a pig to get.

That said this is overall a creditable process in my mind, and they picked up a small hydraulic leak in the brake system, some missing fuel hose clips (though it was WF that supplied the engine without them fitted) and a missing split pin in the handbrake connection.

The other nice thing about this test is that it is iterative, i.e. they only test the failed items on a retest.

When we got back, Chrissy was persuaded to have her first little drive (off the trailer and into the garage).

Thanks to Bob, Rory's Dad and Ewan for their kind thoughts, they are much appreciated.

Restest is two weeks on Friday.