Attention all British drivers.. be aware of this legality

hollydolly

hollydolly

SF VIP
Location
London England
we all know that it's illegal to drive with tyres that have nearly or no tread.. and of course you'd never drive with tyres that are flat, but did you all know that it's even illegal to drive with tyres that are just as little as 20 % under pressure , and you can face points on your licence and a fine.. ?

I'm shocked.. but read this from my neighbourhood app today from someone in a nearby town...

Be aware, being caught with a low pressure tyre in the UK can turn you into the worst villain all of a sudden!

Last September I was pulled over outside a supermarket in Hertfordshire for a tyre check.

My rear tyres resulted to be under the pressure suggested by the car manual.
Be careful, we are not talking flat tyre here, we are talking low pressure you could barely notice with visual inspection.

I probably made the mistake not to ask to keep evidences of the test run with a simple pressure indicator such as the one used for bicycles. Indeed it was a mistake but honestly, didn’t expect such a disproportionate and unfair ending.

That being said the policeman informed that this needed to be treated as criminal offence(!) and after having written a report of his findings he said that I would have got a final decision after few weeks.

After about five months, I have got an envelope in my post containing a notice from the Magistrates Courts asking whether I wished to plead guilty.

Pleading not guilty would have meant going through trial (!!) with an initial cost of minimum 600 £.

It goes without saying I did plead guilty hoping for a proportionate and fair estimate of my charge.
None of the two!!

Eventually, I got final verdict today and you know what? I was sentenced to pay within one week a fine of 520 £ among which 129 £ as surcharge to fund victim services(!!)
Victims ?! I am the victim here ! Victim of a disproportionate application of blind bureaucracy.

Three points off the driving licence come as a standard. I still cannot believe but it is all sadly true.

Eventually someone needs to explain me why a speed limit ticket, which is far worse then a low-pressure tyre, is not considered a criminal offence.

Is it because the thousands of tickets raised on a daily basis will probably clog up the court bureaucracy in the attempt to manage all the paperwork?

Dear Police officers, instead of pulling over people when feeling bored on a Saturday afternoon why don’t you check road status our areas area with holes so deep to drown a cat when it is raining?

This is so absurd and ridiculous.


In further posts after being questioned by dozens of people , he said that his tyre was less than 20 % deflated.. :eek:
 

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It seems like the fellow who wrote the original post should send his letter to the newspaper. It really does seem like a strange law. There may be more than one side to this story.
 
Jules said:
It seems like the fellow who wrote the original post should send his letter to the newspaper. It really does seem like a strange law. There may be more than one side to this story.
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seems not, this is what happened. he was questioned by other posters closely.. and it apparently is correct... and it is in fact illegal to have your tyres below pressure.. as the story went on others posted that they'd had the same
 
Capt Lightning said:
Hmmmm... hard to believe. In any case, most cars have sensors that detect tyre pressures being out of spec. Mrs. L's car displays reminders to check the tyre pressures.
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yes , my car does also capt......it tells me everything lol.....including open my eyes when going around a bend LOL
joking

ive bought a digital tyre pressure kit, as ive only once tried pumping them outside a garage , the thing snapped of the valve and the tyre went down......OMG ...hubby was sitting in the car , with no wheelchair in boot.....luckily, there was a small mechanic shop opposite , and he got one of the lads to push the car over and they fixed it....so i will never attempt that procedure again...!!
my mechanic normally comes to the house to sort them out ...
 
I’ve kind of held back a bit from responding to this thread. As I found it intriguing and worthy of just reading for now. At the time of my first post I couldn’t help wondering whether there was some kind of social experiment going on in this thread. As I read through each post again now, I still feel compelled to say, I don't see anything in the first post that makes much sense.
 
hollydolly said:
there's way too much detail in this person's story for it not to be true..he's verrry upset!
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I think it’s fair to say that the level of detail that someone might give has no bearing on how truthful something is. It’s also fair to say that it’s very possible for someone to give a lot of detail about a false or exaggerated story. Someone becoming upset or emotional about it adds no truth or credibility to it either. There is no correlation between detail & truthfulness of any subject.
 
Magna-Carta said:
I think it’s fair to say that the level of detail that someone might give has no bearing on how truthful something is. It’s also fair to say that it’s very possible for someone to give a lot of detail about a false or exaggerated story. Someone becoming upset or emotional about it adds no truth or credibility to it either.
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Belive me this guy has been questioned closely by dozens..literally dozens.. so far 79 people have posted... and it seems very true....
 
This is part of his reply to many question he received...

The suggested pressure as per car manual was 2.2 whereas my 2 rear tyres were at around 1.7/1.8.
Apart from technicalities though, my point is the outcome is disproportional and ridiculous when compared to the real associated risk.

Once again, driving over 30 miles where required as such ( hence with high risk to hit and kill someone ) is punished with a ticket of 100 pounds and that’s it!
Whereas, an under pressure tyre goes through court as criminal offence and ends up with a fine of 520 pounds and 3 points off your licence!
Don’t get me wrong but I am afraid I was victim of an abuse of power.
People should be trained to power before being sent out to enforce it.
The correct outcome for such an issue should be either an initial warning subject to a fine if caught a second time with the same issue or, even a ticket agreed in the first place.
Magistrate court don’t even give you a breakdown of your fine. Magistrate should explain the reason why he decided to raise a fine of 500 pounds. Why not £2500 at this stage since that is the upper limit for illegal tyres?
Did I cause an accident because of that? Nope. That should count. Nothing explained whatsoever.
I was just presented the bill and forced to pay within 7 days! This is not acceptable.
 
Alligatorob said:
That is a strange one, guess you Brits really care about your tire pressure...
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The TREAD ACT, made Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems mandatory for all light vehicles sold in the USA, since 2007. This was due to the Ford/Firestone fiasco, earlier on.

What happens after the vehicle is sold is another matter, and likely varies by state.
 
hollydolly said:
Belive me this guy has been questioned closely by dozens..literally dozens.. so far 79 people have posted... and it seems very true....
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The OP said this, “I was sentenced to pay within one week a fine of 520 £ among which 129 £ as surcharge to fund victim services(!!)” As far as I’m aware, the time period for paying any court fine in the UK is 28 days, the court can give the defendant more time to pay if they have a good reason. I think this is well known? But why would a court significantly reduce the time period for paying a fine from what is normal? Would the court even legaly be able to do that? And do that for the poupose of what?

The person also says, “I probably made the mistake not to ask to keep evidences of the test run…” I don’t even know what that means, in the context given regarding the whole post.

The person chose to plead guilty. His decision, no-one else’s. Yet there is no law as far as I’m aware regarding tyre pressures. And tyre pressures that the person says, “…low pressure you could barely notice with visual inspection” When is this law supposed to have come into effect

I’m not aware of it being, “…illegal to drive with tyres that are just as little as 20 % under pressure”, in itself. Let’s consider this for a moment. I had “runflat” tyres on my car, designed to run during a puncture and no air pressure. Would these be considered illegal to use based on this law that I can’t find any evidence of existing.

The only thing I can see regarding tyre inflation in the MOT test is that, the tyre shall not be used if the tyre is not so inflated as to make it fit for use. There is nothing that I can see in the MOT Test that mentions tyre pressures as an actual check item. For anyone who doesn’t know, the MOT is a Ministry Of Transport safety and roadworthiness test, carried out by law every year on vehicles older than 3 years.

I can maybe imagine someone being stopped by the police and found to have seriously defective tyres, for one reason or another, which is illegal. The person says, “My rear tyres”. It seems more likely that someone had two defective tyres, and maybe as a consequence of the police inspecting them, they also recorded that the tyres were low in pressure. Even a fine of £520, plus £129 surcharge seems harsh (£649) for seriously defective tyres. It seems that something somewhere might not be ringing true.
 
Magna-Carta said:
The OP said this, “I was sentenced to pay within one week a fine of 520 £ among which 129 £ as surcharge to fund victim services(!!)” As far as I’m aware, the time period for paying any court fine in the UK is 28 days, the court can give the defendant more time to pay if they have a good reason. I think this is well known? But why would a court significantly reduce the time period for paying a fine from what is normal? Would the court even legaly be able to do that? And do that for the poupose of what?

The person also says, “I probably made the mistake not to ask to keep evidences of the test run…” I don’t even know what that means, in the context given regarding the whole post.

The person chose to plead guilty. His decision, no-one else’s. Yet there is no law as far as I’m aware regarding tyre pressures. And tyre pressures that the person says, “…low pressure you could barely notice with visual inspection” When is this law supposed to have come into effect

I’m not aware of it being, “…illegal to drive with tyres that are just as little as 20 % under pressure”, in itself. Let’s consider this for a moment. I had “runflat” tyres on my car, designed to run during a puncture and no air pressure. Would these be considered illegal to use based on this law that I can’t find any evidence of existing.

The only thing I can see regarding tyre inflation in the MOT test is that, the tyre shall not be used if the tyre is not so inflated as to make it fit for use. There is nothing that I can see in the MOT Test that mentions tyre pressures as an actual check item. For anyone who doesn’t know, the MOT is a Ministry Of Transport safety and roadworthiness test, carried out by law every year on vehicles older than 3 years.

I can maybe imagine someone being stopped by the police and found to have seriously defective tyres, for one reason or another, which is illegal. The person says, “My rear tyres”. It seems more likely that someone had two defective tyres, and maybe as a consequence of the police inspecting them, they also recorded that the tyres were low in pressure. Even a fine of £520, plus £129 surcharge seems harsh (£649) for seriously defective tyres. It seems that something somewhere might not be ringing true.
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why are you asking me, ? I'm just the messenger..however I am a researcher, and I never post anything here as a factual statement unless I'm more certain than not it's true... ..if you don't want to believe it..don't..you clearly don't want to.. but go ask a copper..... however he did explain in a long post about how he'd completed a form on the .gov site asking for time to pay... and all the hassle that caused..
 
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Harry Le Hermit said:
The TREAD ACT, made Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems mandatory for all light vehicles sold in the USA, since 2007. This was due to the Ford/Firestone fiasco, earlier on.

What happens after the vehicle is sold is another matter, and likely varies by state.
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Yeah, we have those sensors but they don't always work and when one fails it usually costs more to get it fixed than most people want to spend. And of course a lot of folks just ignore them. There is no requirement to maintain or pay attention...

I do try to pay attention to mine, but have had some fail and just decided it wasn't worth fixing.
 
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