IVA passed

Happily, I passed the retest today without issues. I had a much more civilised 12:30 appointment, so set out around 10 in (intermittent) sunshine, which was pretty nice.

Setting out.

I had to stop pretty soon to take the steering wheel off and put it back on again as it was far from straight - fortunately I'd brought all the right tools so this didn't take long.

Wheel back on. Thanks to Ben for the lend of the helmet.

The process was very smooth - the inspector had a quick look at the list of failures from my prior test, looked around the car for a few minutes and ticked off a few obvious ones. Fortunately, this included the forward vision issue which was the one thing I was most concerned about - he didn't bother measuring the headlight height, probably because it's quite a faff to do, but just said "that looks fine". Indicator position was right on the limit of acceptability (the outer edge of the indicator was exactly 40 cm in from the outermost edge of the car, which is the maximum permitted), but the rules say 40 cm, so he passed that too. Finally he had a quick drive around the block to check self centering. Unlike last time, he didn't have to spend a few minutes doing circles on full lock - obviously he was satisfied by just going around the block, which was as expected as the car was self-centering quite nicely on the way there.

Waiting for the IVA inspector to finish his lunch break.

Fortunately it didn't snow this time.

I got the certificate and went off to Peterborough DVLA office to get it registered and taxed, but sadly got there five minutes after it closed, so that will have to wait.

The car car drove very nicely there and back, the only issue being the fuel consumption which (mostly a steady 70ish on a dual carriage way) was not more than 20 mpg, a fair bit worse than expected. I think a new lambda sensor may help here. If not I'm not totally sure what I will do about this...