Fitness to drive
Optometrists have always been at pains to stress that the MOT standard number plate test is not in itself a sufficient guide as to someone’s fitness to drive.
Optometrists have always been at pains to stress that the MOT standard number plate test is not in itself a sufficient guide as to someone’s fitness to drive.
Author: Neil Handley, Museum Curator
Date: 1 June 2015
1st June 2015 marks the 80th anniversary of the compulsory driving test in the UK. Even then, if you had begun driving prior to April Fool’s Day 1934, you could continue driving without ever having passed a test. This meant that, even until relatively recently, there were some older drivers on the roads who had never demonstrated their fitness to be behind the wheel.
Introduced with the driving test, was the Ministry of Transport driver’s eyesight requirement – the so-called car number plate test. This always took place before the main test began; if you couldn’t see it wasn’t worth continuing, however it has always been permissible to wear spectacles for the test; the licence will be valid just as long as the driver always wears the same vision correction whenever they drive.
The test remains the only form of eye test (as opposed to visual screening) that can legally be performed by a non-qualified person, ie. a policeman or a driving instructor, and failure in the test at the roadside can lead to the confiscation of your car keys.
An old-style registration plate in the College museum serves to illustrate this point. When I was looking to source one I rang up a prominent contact lens manufacturer who is also known as a vintage car enthusiast. He had a plate of precisely the right age in his garage which was originally attached to a 1935 Riley. In the 1930s Riley enjoyed much racing car success and, by mid-1933, the Riley Motor Club had become the largest single-make motor club in the world, with over 2000 members. The design of the plate is very different from one of today. The three letters followed by three numbers system had just been introduced and lasted until the mid 1950s and reflective number plates weren't introduced until 1973.
The distance at which the plate must be read used to be 20.5 metres, but was reduced to 20 metres when the current format of plate was introduced in 2001. I remember my own driving test very well. The test instructor asked me to ‘read the plate on that Ford Escort over there’. I replied ‘Oh, you mean that Ford Orion?’ thereby demonstrating still higher powers of visual observation!
The test remains the only form of eye test (as opposed to visual screening) that can legally be performed by a non-qualified person, ie. a policeman or a driving instructor, and failure in the test at the roadside can lead to the confiscation of your car keys. Nevertheless, as optometrists have always been at pains to stress, the MOT standard number plate test is not in itself a sufficient guide as to someone’s fitness to drive. Other clinical factors such as their field of vision at speed and capacity for dark-adaptation may be of importance, not to mention the other physical factors affecting their ability to see well on the road, whether that be correctly aligned headlights, glare from sunlight, tinted windscreens etc.