PRIOR CONVICTION
Matt Prior
The government has updated its rules about restoring and modifying cars.
The regulations are longer than before but the outcomes are simpler, and I’ve read them so that... well, I was going to say that you don’t have to, but if you’re going to make big changes to a car, you still should.
I’ll run through them as comprehensively as I can, so excuse the fact that this column is drier and contains fewer dad jokes than usual.
Previously, if you were restoring a car to original standard, you probably didn’t have to tell the DVLA about it. Now you might have to. Meanwhile, if you were making big modifications (‘Radically Altered Vehicles’), you didn’t necessarily have to inform the DVLA, because there was a points system that, if you wanted to keep the original registration and not be given a ‘Q’ numberplate, you should have complied with, including making no structural chassis or monocoque changes.