Dispute flares over lost wheels
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• A dispute over responsibility for two lost wheels has flared up between an owner-driver and a second-hand truck dealer after the driver found himself stranded on a motorway when the wheels fell off his truck less than 36 hours after he bought it.
Winston Bunker, a sub-contractor with Scottish firm H Coulthard, bought the L-reg Scania 38-tonner from secondhand truck dealer Carlisle-based Cumbria Truck Centre last year through a finance company, paying about £30,000.
While driving up to the M6/M62 junction Bunker was horrified when two wheels came off the truck, one of them going down the hard shoulder.
But Richard Berry, who runs Cumbria Truck Centre, insists it was Bunker's responsibility to check the wheelnuts each time he drove the vehicle. The vehicle had been checked by one of the company's fitters the day Bunker bought it, says Berry. He is satisfied that the vehicle was roadworthy because it had been a rental vehicle and was regularly inspected. "That was not the first journey that Bunker had made in the vehicle and everybody knows that it is the driver's responsibility to check the wheelnuts each time," says Berry. If Bunker has a gripe he should take it up with the finance company, he says, adding that Cumbria Truck Centre sells hundreds of trucks every year with no complaints.