Check Your Brake Lights!

How do you look from behind?  Not you personally of course, but your car. Recent studies have found that around 11% of drivers in the UK are driving around with a broken brake light.   You know that this makes the vehicles unfit to pass its MOT (and cars off the road for any reason is something that Fleet Managers do not like) – but did you know it is cause for a £60 fine and penalty points to the license of the company vehicle driver?

According to research by TescoCars.com the number of vehicles with missing brake lights has increased 68% since 2010 – one in nine of us are still driving around with a brake light out.

Rebecca Ryan, marketing manager from Tesco Cars, said:

“An alarming number of cars are missing important safety features – it’s a major concern for road safety and a potentially fatal fault in low light conditions.”

However not only are we driving around with no brake lights, further reports have also shown that 3% of cars had at least one non-functioning headlight. Perhaps we have more of an excuse for missing the brake lights. After all none us of do have eyes in the back of our heads, but it’s hard to miss a broken headlight!

Autoblog have blogged about the story, and have pointed out the following.

Tesco gathered the information during rush hour periods, although the company doesn’t say what size sample was collected. It noted that 3% of vehicles were missing one or more headlamps, and 4% had no brake lights working at all.

If we don’t know the sample size then we don’t know the real size of the problem. However it is a timely reminder to check if brake lights and headlights are all working fine. Is is time to review your fleet management system? And the cost of checking? Well that’s free….