The organisation in charge of the roadworthiness of the UK’s car population has said that the annual MOT test is likely to be stricter on emissions and safety technology in the future.

In an interview with Autoexpress, Neil Barlow, head of MOT policy at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency warned that the latest technology advertised by the motor companies to reduce admissions must live up to their promises otherwise the cars could be severely penalised.

Barlow admitted that cars may even have to meet the emissions recorded when they went through an initial approval process.

“Manufacturers put loads of effort into designing some pretty whizzy tech that goes on modern cars with internal combustion engines,” Barlow said.

“We will probably want to be better at checking that those systems will be working as designed. Obviously that won’t be back to factory design, and has to be a solution that’s cost-effective for industry.

“There’s no change planned that there’s a date for, but this is the direction of travel - emissions will be an important thing to check. It probably is clear as we look ahead, that if we want to keep driving down overall emission levels, we’ve got to check that cars are performing as they were designed.”

In a wide ranging interview with the motoring website, Barlow also revealed that car safety systems are in their sights.

He said: “From a motorists perspective, you might say ‘well I would expect that to be tested’. But what are its failure modes? What do we find with the experience of this being in service for a while? Does it actually go wrong? In what ways does it go wrong?

“The stuff we want to test is the stuff that does go wrong. There’s no point in testing stuff that proves to be incredibly reliable. I’m not saying that [AEB] is one or the other of those.. but we need to make sure it’s evidence based, what we include in the test.”

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