Driving a car home after it's failed an MOT has always been a bit of a grey area, even before the days of computerised tests. However, at the end of the day, you have to look at the situation in practical terms.

Bucca has quite a good answer, really, in suggesting a pre-MOT test for which nothing will be officially recorded, thought this would, no doubt, involve extra cost and inconvenience.

Are police cars regularly parked outside MOT testing stations to stop cars which have just failed their MOT? Well, actually, no, they aren't!

I don't think there will ever be an acceptable answer to the driving home after a failed MOT test question. The only 100% perfect answer would be that, after any car had failed, it had to be transported back to a place of repair or the owners home on the back of a transporter! I don't think anyone would really want this to be introduced, I myself certainly wouldn't.

Mind you, I tend not to do very much in the line of repairing cars these days, anyway. Any car of mine that fails the MOT test will just be left at the garage these days with the instructions "Please fix it!"

yes but its still on data base as a fail,

need to put car in for a pre- mot test before the officilal test

yet more money!!

I don't see the problem in an MOT fail appearing on the database - sometimes failure cannot be spotted during previous services/MOTs or on the road during the year, and as long as they've been rectified, there's no issue. Older cars will, inevitably (unless you spend a small fortune on maintenance) go wrong from time to time, parts will fail.

That said, where faults are listed over more than one year, or that SHOULD be obvious to owners (e.g. serious tyre, light or windscreen wiper defects) which then fail rightly point to an owner who, for whatever reason, cannot be bothered to effectively maintain their car. Again, I see no problem in this information being made available to potential buyers.

Before the recession and the introduction of fully computerised MOTs (during the manufacturers' UK 'good times' when prices of cars were still high compared to the rest of Europe [up to late 90s/early 2000s]), my old Nissan Micra's local main dealer always did a pre-MOT inspection during the service (I always have them done at the same time for this reason), so that any issues could be found and remedied before the car was MOTed following its service.

Sadly, with the introdution of the computerised, 'automated' MOT and latterly with tighter margins at dealerships, this could no longer be done, and lo and behold the car failed an MOT. I knew then it was time to part company with the car (too many expensive issues worth fixing compared to its worth, especially as one was structural). Amazingly, after PXing it (I told the truth about everything), it was sold on and stayed on the road for about 3-4 years.

yes but its still on data base as a fail,

need to put car in for a pre- mot test before the officilal test

yet more money!!

Why would you need to do that?

The penalty for no MOT is a fine but no points (ie. not that serious). But even that doesn't apply if the old MOT still covers the car.

If the MOT discovers somethign serious, and the car is genuinely no longer roadworthy then that's a different case - you commited an offence driving to the MOT (Ignorance is not an effective excuse), and you'd be committing an offence driving away - but that's nothing to do with its MOT status.