Bilbesiktning

Today was the day for our annual vehicle safety inspection, Bilbesiktning. Actually, for some reason we both thought that it was yesterday and we arrived all bright eyed and bushy tailed to our local Bilprovning station at 7am yesterday morning. A little embarassing but it did mean that we were early to work that day. But today was the real thing. Vehicle inspection for personal cars in Sweden is carried out annually. For cars over 5 years old. In New Zealand it was 6 monthly. I'm not sure why there is a difference, both processes seem to be equally thorough. I think, from a pure safety angle, I prefer the 6 monthly inspections. A lot can happen over 6 months, especially in terms of tyre wear. Given that most Swedes change their tyres from summer tyres to winter tyres, and then back, I think that vehicles should be inspected at least once during both of those periods. Maybe the second 6 monthly inspection could be limited to tyre inspections only. As it stands today our car is always only inspected during the summer, so only the summer tyres are ever seen. We store our winter tyres at a "Tyre Hotel" so it's not very practical to go there, load up our winter tyres, drive to the testing station, have them haul out the winter tyres to check them, put them back in the car, have us drive back to the Tyre Hotel, have them take out our tyres from the car and store them away again. Imagine that from a couple of million grumpy car owners. We have really good winter tyres. However they could have easily been crappy tyres and no one would be any the wiser. Yes, we would get in trouble if we had an accident in winter due to poor winter tyres, but that's all a bit too much after the fact. The damage has already been done. A drive-through "tyre only" inspection during the winter would remove that risk.

Your vehicle inspection date in Sweden is determined by the last number on your vehicle licence plate. 10 numbers spread over 12 months. 1 through 4 are inspected January through April, whilst 5 through 0 are inspected July to December. You actually have a 5 month window to have your car inspected, with your designated number month being the month in the middle. You have the 2 months prior and the 2 months following. Our plate ends in a 5, so we have from the first day in May until the last day in September to have our vehicle inspected. The inspection date and process is all very dignified. Typically Swedish. You get a note in the mail before your inspection period starts, giving you the date, time, place, and cost, of your inspection. That's different from the system I left in NZ where you queued up for sometimes hours on end at the government testing stations. You can, like we did, alter your inspection date and time on their on-line website prior to inspection. By the time you arrive they know exactly who is coming and you've already paid the fee. Very professional. Unless you're one of those idiots who turns up a day early.

Watching the inspection process it seemed to be very similar to that in New Zealand. Maybe NZ is a bit more robust checking under the car and looking for rust etc. Swedish cars do seem to be in much better condition over all than NZ cars, so maybe there's less of a need to seek out worn parts. Swedish cars seem to be well maintained and serviced. The length of time was about the same, at around 15 minutes. That included for them disappearing out of the garage with the car for a while. I'm not quite sure what they are doing out there that they can't do inside the garage. At the end of the process you're handed a brief (and I'm being generous) inspection summary. Probably 90% of the form is taken up with the vehicle description and the owner's name. I'd like to see more than that. In NZ we got a full print out of every inspected item together with a pass/fail/comment for each item. We had our summer tyres for 4 years now. They must be getting a bit worn now, even though we don't drive huge distances. I would have like to have seen something wrtten about the tread depth. It helps with forward planning if nothing else. When I asked the guy he simply told me that they looked fine. Will they be fine next year ? Next 2 years? We did have a small crack in our windscreen which was the only thing noted on the report. He "recommended" that we should probably have it fixed before next year. Which we were going to do anyway. A couple of winters back we had a small crack in our windscreen which exploded one day when driving the 5 minutes to the stables due to thermal contraction at -30 deg C. That wasn't much fun. Some items, like our windscreen, merely get noted for our information. Other items can be fixed by the local garage who then update the central data system without the need for a re-inspection. I think we once needed to have our parking brake adjusted that way. Major faults need to be re-inspected after repairs. So there's some leeway there.

Pain free and happy motoring for another year.