New Feature Lookup road tax and MOT in the garage

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Record keeping = Good ​

I've updated the garage now to make "Registration Number" (or Number Plate number or License Plate number or whatever!) a required field. This will help us in the future with record keeping of vehicles, but also allows us to do some pretty cool stuff!

Using the (publicly available) information from the DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service and the DVLA Mot History API, the garage is now able to import data such as Tax Status, MOT Status, Mileage and even MOT History which is now all show in a new data block.

No! What about my privacy!

Don't worry - this information is only visible to you, for everyone else, half of it will be stared out

The main info blook looks like this:

You can then click the mileage number to get a yearly breakdown (based on MOT data)

Or click the MOT Status field to get a list of all the MOT tests taken along with all fails and advisories listed

To stop the data becoming stale, a cron job runs every night to refresh it, so it will all be kept nicely up to date.

I know this isn't the most exciting feature added, but I think it's pretty damn cool and useful to quickly see a vehicle status.

But I didn't fill in my registration number!

When I have some free time, I'll start going through all the cars in the garage to add in their registration number (thus allowing the data to import) but....

It would be really helpful if you guys could help me out!

All you need to do is go to your vehicle page, hit the Edit link at the bottom of the introduction then scroll to the bottom to see the fields. As soon as you hit save, the system will fire a job to look up your status (but you might need to refresh to see it)

Any other ideas what we can do with this data let me know, I'm all ears!

 

[AndyRKett]

what i would suggest is not making it a compulsory field.

I have private plates that i have carried from one car to another for over 20 years now so what might have been on the car 10 years ago is a completely different car now, and I don't want my private reg plate (as much as I can help it) anywhere on the internet.

So there should be the option to opt out.

 

[ben]

what i would suggest is not making it a compulsory field.

I have private plates that i have carried from one car to another for over 20 years now so what might have been on the car 10 years ago is a completely different car now, and I don't want my private reg plate (as much as I can help it) anywhere on the internet.

So there should be the option to opt out.

You can always just put something else in that field if you really don't want it stored, it doesn't validate it.

I think yours is quite an edge case though - also remember it's never shown, only you (and I) will know what it is

 

[AndyRKett]

Brilliant feature, cool that you have been able to integrate it into the forum

It would be useful if when say selling a car the person selling it had the option to tick a box and have the MOT status and history included in their ad.

 

[ben]

I've added a new item to the statistics widget so we can see how many people have currently put in their info

Let's try and get that up a bit!

 

[Kevincamper]

I can't really see the point of it as you can look up info on the Gov. Sites already if you need to check up on a vehicle. I feel there is far too much info on the internet that is mostly nothing to do with anyone else. Why volunteer more freely to anyone looking into your business.
Sorry , this section is not for me.

 

[ben]

That's fair, but it's all optional.

The mot history and what not is just a bonus, I did this originally so we can keep a record of which fiats are still on the road.

It's interesting to look through old entries in the garage and know if they live on

When I get some time, I'll look into adding a "flair" to the thumbnails (say green for taxed, blue for sorn and red for untaxed/scrapped)

 

[Kevincamper]

That's fair, but it's all optional.

The mot history and what not is just a bonus, I did this originally so we can keep a record of which fiats are still on the road.

It's interesting to look through old entries in the garage and know if they live on

When I get some time, I'll look into adding a "flair" to the thumbnails (say green for taxed, blue for sorn and red for untaxed/scrapped)

OK , that's fair enough. Good idea for those who want it.
Thanks for reply Kevin.

 

[ben]

Just realised that colour, year of manufacture, engine capacity and fuel type are also in the VES data - so I'll use this to fill in any missing values on cars in the garage.

It won't overwrite anything if you guys set it manually (because things like engine swap, respray, fuel conversion etc) - but it will help me as I start going through the older entries and can just put in the number plate to automatically get the rest