Tire care

Tires on my car are getting old and bald. Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to replace them now and driving like they are is not fun anymore. So I decided to swap the front tires with back ones to buy myself a couple of month.

I passed by the 24×7 tire care service. While one technician was swapping the wheels, balancing them and checking for other problems, I was talking to another one. He told me a few interesting things that I didn’t know or forgot about.

• There is a specification of how bad one’s tires can be. Police is actually cheching tires on the cars once in a while. Offenders are fined 50 CYP per tire. I thought that there should be a law about it and fines and everything, but the accuracy of the claim should be taken with a grain of salt from the guy who sells tires for life. Anyway, so far I seem to have one tire which is illiegal.
• In Cyprus, all cars older than 4 years must have an MOT check (mechanical compliance test). There is a fine for not having MOT certificate. But that’s not all. Without MOT certificate one can’t pay the road tax. Unpaid road tax is a finable offense by itself. And that is still not it. Without the MOT certificate, the insurance is invalid and non-enforcable. That’s right – if you will have an accident, your insurance won’t pay up unless you have an MOT certificate. Interesting, isn’t it?

So, all these news just show that I will be spending a bit more money in the near future than I wanted. Firstly, I’ll have to bring the car for service and get an MOT certification while I am at it. Than I’ll have to go pay the road tax. And than I’ll have to save some money for the tires. I need to buy at least 2 of those. All of these make an amount of roughly 400 CYP shine much nearer than the horizon. Oh, well… At least I enjoy every kilometer driven in my car.