Where do the facts come from?
Rules come from the people who make or enforce them: NZTA for the WoF, Consumer Protection for the Consumer Guarantees Act and the Fair Trading Act, the Disputes Tribunal, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Warranty and trade points come from the MTA, and plain geography from encyclopaedia entries.
Each page lists its sources at the foot, with the date we last checked them. If we can't find a source for something, we leave it out rather than guess.
New Zealand rules, not borrowed ones
Car rules here are their own. A WoF is not the same as an inspection anywhere else, and New Zealand has no licence for mechanics, so our pages never describe a mechanic as licensed.
When a rule changes, we update the pages it touches. How often a car needs a WoF depends on its age and when it was first registered, and NZTA sets and updates those intervals, so our WoF pages send you to NZTA's own table rather than repeating it.
What we never publish
Prices. Every car and fault is different, and only a mechanic who has talked to you can price a job.
Made-up reviews, mechanics, statistics or fault patterns. Reviews come from real businesses in our network.
Promises we can't keep. We never say how fast someone will ring, and we never tell you a car will pass a WoF.
Safety first
On pages about warning lights, overheating or brakes, what to do right now comes before anything else. We never suggest DIY that could hurt someone, like opening a hot radiator cap or working under a car held up only by a jack.
Keeping pages current
Each page shows the date it was last updated. We look again at pages when the rules behind them change, and at least once a year otherwise.
Some of the photos on this site are illustrations, made with an AI image tool. None of them shows a real job, or a garage in our network.