Currently there are 400,000 commercial vehicles in the Irish fleet. As the impact of the recession takes its toll, companies are struggling to refresh fleets and instead are leaving older vehicles on the road. This has an obvious road-safety element.
The Government has designated the Road Safety Authority to oversee commercial vehicle testing on a day-to-day basis and has also released Commercial Vehicle Roadworthiness Certificate (CVR) information to the public for the first time so customers can check official roadworthiness of these vans before they buy.
There has been a dramatic fall off in the numbers of vehicles registered to the commercial fleet since the recession took hold. Commercial registrations of 2009 vehicles were a mere 31 percent of 2008 registrations, showing a very significant drop. Commercial numbers haven't regained any kind of foothold since then.
From this month Cartell.ie will be able to check if a vehicle has a current CVR Cert and say they would discourage anyone from buying a vehicle without one.
