The ITV

I don't think that British people taking their car for an MOT  (The UK safety inspection) fret too much about it. It's just another job to be done, like deworming the cat. It's exactly the same in Spain. There's a technical inspection, the ITV, for cars and almost anything else that rolls on the road from trailers and caravans to lorries and tractors. The main difference is that the test in Spain can only be done done at specialist centres. If nothing has changed, in the 20 years since I last took a car for an MOT in the UK,  then any approved garage, service centre or workshop can do the MOT test there.

So the Spanish process is simple enough. I'm going to talk about cars. Different vehicles are treated differently with different test periods and different rules but they all use the same test centres. It can be slightly intimidating to be doing the test on a car while running alongside a four metre high 44 ton artic in the next bay along.

For the first three full years a new car is considered to be good to go. No need for a test. On, or a bit before, the fourth birthday the car needs to be tested. After that the test is every couple of years until the car reaches ten and, from then on, every year. 

The process is simple too. You show the vehicle paperwork in the reception office, pay the appropriate fee. Diesel cars cost more than petrol cars, there are differences between cars with and without catalysers and the least expensive test is for electric cars. I paid 44.53€ for the test on my petrol car. The fee paid, you and the car get sent to a sort of assembly line. The process starts at one end of a big shed and the vehicle processes through the shed with everything getting checked as you go.

The first part is all very hands on. Lights, headlamp alignment, horn, windscreen wipers, squirters, seatbelts - anything that the tester person can check with the car standing still. Sometimes the testers are very thorough, buckling up the rear seat belts, checking the quality of the wiper blades, and other times the checking of the smaller things is pretty cursory. It may be different testers, it may different test stations or it may just be the idea that newer cars need less checking. I tend to the latter because I noticed that the same bloke who guided my car through the test was much more thorough with a battered 19 year old Ford Fiesta, that went through a couple of cars before me, than he was with my four year old Arona. With the car still at the very start of the shed there's the emissions and noise check. Again there are different rules for different ages of vehicles. My 1977 MGB GT went through despite the slight blue haze from the exhaust. With the initial checks done you start to move through the shed. The rolling road comes first, to check the brakes. Then to the pit where there's an under car inspection - brake lines, exhaust, suspension joints, general health, bodywork rot and a steering check which involves riving the steering wheel from side to side and some other stuff that I forget.

None of this is particularly tricky. It's a perfectly sensible process and despite the usual moans from my compatriots that the Spanish test is a joke, in comparison to the, obviously, infinitely superior, British test, it's a straightforward process for checking compliance with European construction and use rules.

The funny thing is that, despite what I said at the beginning, for we foreigners it is actually a bit of an event. I know plenty of people who pay a mechanic to take their cars through for them. I know of one test centre that offers to take the car through for we foreigners. I think that, once again, it's the language. Not always though - it is also simply that it's a process that's a bit alien. My car has automatic lights so, in four years I've hardly ever used the light switch. I had to check the handbook to see how to put on sidelights, how the the rear fog light worked etc. Language wise though I have no real problem with conversational Spanish and my car vocabulary is OK too. Even then, sitting in a car with the tester standing outside and saying - left blinker (or turn signal, or trafficator, or indicator), both, brakes, dip, front fog, rear fog etc. - there is forced to be a moment when you either miss what is said or don't have a clue what they mean. The testers have accents, they mumble, they have shortcuts, they presume you know the drill, they've already done this forty times today and they are not at all emotionally involved in the process. This time for instance the tester bloke was much more interested in talking to me about my 20 year old Tag Heuer watch, and the Omega Seamaster that had preceded it, than he was in commenting on the steering castor angle. He was waving the paperwork around, with or without the all important windscreen sticker, as he talked about the beauty of Bulova Accutron watches to the point that I felt I had to interrupt to ask if the car had passed its ITV.

Equivalence

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must get a drink "por la tarde", I think afternoon and they're thinking just after work.

I have great difficulty in trying to explain about the difference between British style public holidays and Spanish style non working days without misusing the word holiday. The idea I have, entrenched with me since I was a lad, is that non working days are holidays. Easter Monday and May Day are holidays and the couple of weeks in Skeggy in July are holidays too. For Spaniards a holiday is a holiday and a day off work is a "festive" day. Amongst we Britons the idea of a public holiday is that it's a part of our holiday entitlement. So, if Christmas Day and Boxing Day, both of which are UK Public Holidays, fall on a Saturday and Sunday then we will get compensatory days on Monday and Tuesday. The Spanish idea is different. Spaniards have working days and non working days. Their "non working" calendar includes certain days and anniversaries which are national non working days - Constitution Day, All Saints, Good Friday plus some regional non working days decided by each Autonomous Community and, finally, a couple of local non working days which will be different in Pinoso to the local days in say Monóvar or Elda. If the day off falls on a working day, that's Monday through Saturday, then lots of people, won't have to go to work. If the non working day/anniversary falls on a Sunday then people won't have to go to work either. So, to a Spanish legislators way of thinking, the effect is the same. Last year for instance The day of the Valencian Community fell on a Saturday. The day was marked in the calendars as a non working day but, as most working people don't habitually work on Saturdays, it made absolutely no difference to the vast majority of working people in Alicante, Valencia or Castellón. They finished on Friday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning. It was the same with Christmas day in 2021 and January 1st 2022 was another Saturday. Father's day is a National non working day but, in 2022, it will fall on a Saturday so most people won't really notice the difference - well, except for the meal. That's why neither Mother's Day nor Easter Sunday feature as "holidays" in Spain because Sunday isn't a working day. It also means that the public days off work vary from year to year.

This idea of finding an equivalent struck me the other day when someone asked me about their Suma. Suma is a tax collection agency that was set up by the provincial level government of Alicante back in 1990. It basically assesses, bills, collects and enforces local taxes for the municipalities in Alicante Province. Suma doesn't set the taxes, the local municipalities do. So, Pinoso, our town council, uses Suma to collect Road Tax and so does Sax Town Council but the tax for the same type of cars, the least environmentally friendly, is 154€ in Pinoso and 201€ in Sax. And there you have an example - I said Road Tax but that tax here is qualitatively different to the Motor Duty payable in the UK. The tax we pay here, el impuesto sobre vehículos de tracción mecánica, is a local tax that pays Town Hall wages, the fiesta fireworks and the Christmas lights rather than the upkeep of the nation. That's one of the reasons why, traditionally, there are a lot of toll roads in Spain. Actually with the ending of so many toll road contracts and the bankruptcy of others the National Government is considering ways to raise money for road maintenance from mileage type charges through to a general vehicle duty. 

Now Suma doesn't collect in three of the five municipalities which share a border with Pinoso because they are in Murcia and the person who was talking to me lives in a village that "belongs" to one of those Murciano towns but which, generally, see Pinoso as being their town. It's not surprising that they use the shorthand of saying Suma when they refer to local taxes, "I've not got my Suma bill yet" or "When does the Suma bill come?" because, amongst other things, Suma is much easier to say than alcantillarado or exacciones municipales. Ah!, the joys of foreign living.