Last updated on June 7th, 2024 at 10:15 pm

It struck me recently that many people driving business vehicles run the risk of forgetting when a service or the annual MOT is due. I know that I tend to forget when my service is due and only remember my MOT date when I turn the diary over and see that it’s marked on the next page and I suspect that many business owners are the same – there are just too many things  to remember when you are running your own business.

Part of the problem is that its the vehicle owner’s responsibility to ensure that the due MOT test is carried out on time as there is no official reminder for MOTs unlike the tax disc reminder that you get from the DVLA.

Remember that, as you can see at  this page on the direct gov site,  the penalty for driving a vehicle on the road with an expired MOT certificate is either a fixed penalty notice from the police, currently £60, or a court fine up to a maximum of a £1,000 (something that would most people would baulk at).

This gave me an idea for a business venture so I decided to to a little bit of research in the coming months to see if anyone else had come up with the same idea and get a feeling for the possible market.

Then, today I got a new twitter follower @GoodGarages as a result of a tweet that I had made – as I always do with new followers I checked out their profile to see what they were about and to see if they were “worth” following (it’s amazing how many people follow just anyone without thinking if the person they are following worth it, almost as if the idea is to get as many followers as possible and the only way to do this is to follow anyone).  When I looked as their website I was a little disappointed, but not surprised to see that someone else had come up with an MOT reminder service and had implemented this.

So… for me it’s back to the drawing board but if you are a small business that runs a car or van it might be worth you looking at the good garages site to see if their reminder service would be of any use to you.