Keep It Legal

There are many compelling reasons for not straying too far from the specifications for your vehicle. The vehicle's design, for one, caters for a small deviation in some aspects (eg tyre sizes and wear etc) but radical changes can take the car beyond these limits and really do need to be checked for your own safety.

But there's another reason, and this is going to become more prevalent. Have a look at what happened in this news story.

Notice what happened to the guy's car? Even though they were satisfied that the guy wasn't at fault, they've taken his car away to examine it.

If you have modified your car beyond the recommended limits, it would serve you well to either re-think the need for those modifications or have an engineer certify them as safe.

There's a good chance that the guy in that news story could actually be held accountable for the incident if they determine that the vehicle was unroadworthy due to some change that he'd made to the vehicle or essential maintenance aspect that he'd neglected.

Hopefully we'll not only stay safe, but we'll keep some $ in our pockets and may even promote safer vehicles and driving by setting an example for other road users.

Although they wont charge you insurance companies are allowed to do exactly the same thing after an accident and use anything they find to not pay out the claim. The main difference between cops and insurance companies is that cops care about the cause of the accident and want to make sure the modifications didn't cause it where as insurance companies want to find the mods and figure out a way to prove they caused it.

^^ which is another good reason, thanks, I'd forgotten about that even though it's one of the things I've said myself elsewhere in these forums.

I knew we'd discussed it somewhere before but was too lazy to go looking so I threw it in as a side note

Almost anything you do to your car is illegal, but money talks, and because an engineer says its ok then its not illegal.
My point is my lift kit is a bolt on kit, its been tried and tested and is of a roadworthy condition, but because you are not allowed to raise a car more than 2 inches then my car is automatically illegal, but wait call an engineer get it inspected, which it has been in the factory it was made, also it was installed by professionals, then the engineer says its ok, so your car is in the same condition after the inspection as it was before but its roadworthy and not illegal now cos the engineer said so.

only if the illegal modification can be proven to have caused/contributed to the accident. that goes for insurance and cops

SOLID D22 said:

Almost anything you do to your car is illegal, but money talks, and because an engineer says its ok then its not illegal.
My point is my lift kit is a bolt on kit, its been tried and tested and is of a roadworthy condition, but because you are not allowed to raise a car more than 2 inches then my car is automatically illegal, but wait call an engineer get it inspected, which it has been in the factory it was made, also it was installed by professionals, then the engineer says its ok, so your car is in the same condition after the inspection as it was before but its roadworthy and not illegal now cos the engineer said so.

Click to expand...

I agree mostly with what you're saying, but coming from a performance modification background and working in performance workshops for a few years, I can understand why they want mods to be approved by an engineer. You're definately more likely to get approval if the modifications you have done are a bolt on, widely used part, because as you say they will have been engineered from day dot in the factory. But some of the dodgy and dangerous shit that I've seen people do to their vehicles defies belief, and if they got it inspected by an engineer there's no way it would get the nod.

To be honest I think it's a good thing that you can get otherwise illegal modifications approved by an engineer to make your car legal again, because otherwise it would just be a blanket rule - no modifications whatsoever - and we would all suffer....

Thats true WIR35, and i totally agree that modifications should be checked by an engineer, but i think there should be a difference between calling something dogshit and you need an engineer to inspect and approve of it and then professionally built bolt on kits, which pass with flying colours.

Yeah, that's true, perhaps there should be (or there might even be already) a provision for certain aftermarket parts to be ADR compliant (and state transport authority compliant) if installed as per the design specs etc.

It's probably not much of an issue with older cars, but with new cars it's going to be difficult to get anything engineered i reckon - with all the crash testing, electronic aids, air bags, crumple zones, airbag compatbility for bullbars etc, altering the dynamics of your vehicle is going to have an effect on these things. For what it's worth, I hate all that shit (if everyone drove properly we wouldn't need it), but that's the hand we've been dealt I spose. And governments are so paranoid about things like that they forget the real issue that causes the problems - shitty useless drivers....

Unfortunately for the few that do take care and do understand how their vehicle works, the mindless majority don't. The government has to cater for the herd as a whole, not the individuals.

It's far simpler all around (from a legislation perspective and a courtroom exercise later when the law gets tested as a result of some accident) if there is a law that draws the line erring on the side of caution.

Let's not forget that it's not just the government. Motoring organisations like RACQ, RACV and NRMA are also responsible for lobbying the government to raise safety standards in the ADR, and in turn having these implemented in the vehicles.

They do this because, by and large, the majority of people that get behind the wheel on Australian roads are idiots whose brain cells are all subscribers to Lonely Hearts Club.

What bites is that when one of these morons runs a stop sign and t-bones someone, they'll look for any excuse to avoid responsibility. I'm hoping the news item referred to in the initial post is a clear enough message that our cars - no matter how careful we drive or how well we treat our vehicles - may be subjected to close scrutiny, and that we should bear that in mind when we're considering changing our vehicles so that we don't end up paying for some other idiot's mistake.