So Much For CE Labels!

Under communism they became a byword for cheap nasty cars.

They may have been basic and sold cheaply here, but Communist era Skodas were not "nasty".

Nigel B.

(ex. Estelle120L5, Favorit estate, Felicia hatchback & estate and (the least reliable & most expensive) Fabia esate owner)

Firstly I agree with comments about the CE mark not being a guarantee, it does not indicate anything other than goods thus marked must comply with all relevent EU Directives and Regulations. Now obviously like all trade marks it can be a false claim by unscrupulous parties, all too frequent these days. Compliance with these Directives usually involves manufacturing to a BS, EN or ISO standard (or BS EN ISO). A bit like the ISO9001 quality system, it gurantees nothing other than you have a good system of recording and traceability etc.

I work part time now as engineering manager and have been closely involved for many years with compliance, lately changing documentation and checking compliance with equivalent UK regulations. They are pretty much as EU ones as they were incorporated into UK law.

So we now have the UKCA (United Kingdom Conformity Assessed) mark.

The CE mark can be used alongside for this year probably.

UKCA applies to England Scotalnd and Wales, Northern Ireland remains as CE mark only.

The UKCA mark is not accepted in the EU so the CE mark remains.

Generally I found this fairly straightforward, I think the main problem we will have is actually knowing where our products are going to ensure the correct marking. With the CE mark previously the problem was theoretically the same but in reality we just put the CE mark on everything and seemed to work ok. Unfortunately our EU friends in their wisdom have decided they will have no truck with the UKCA mark appearing.

Bill D.

Here's what to look out for. Perhaps there should be a prize for spotting the first genuine one and another for identifying the first fake!

The UK Government website here explains what has to be done to implement UKCA.

Dave

This is another problem with trade-marks, people believed Skoda's were nasty, irrespective of their actual qualities. Arguably they were value for money. Example joke of the time:

Q. What do you call a convertible Skoda?

A. A skip.

Friend of my dad's was very fond of Skodas and his hobby was doing them up. His main gripe was the cylinder head bolts would shear during maintenance on some, but not others. He reckoned Skoda had to make do with whatever steel was allocated to them centrally, and because cars were low priority under communism, bolts weren't consistently made to withstand heating and cooling.

Dave

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<< Snap ! >>

MichaelG.

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Edit: ... and, reverting to the earlier discussion; it specifically states:

• you must not place any marking or sign that may misconstrue the meaning or form of the UKCA marking to third parties

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 25/01/2021 14:48:11

We still don't know the name of the shop the lamp came from.

[This posting has been removed]

'Skoda' in czech was (is) used as slang for '(that's a) shame' and the 1000MB was referred to as "1000 small pains)

pgk

+1
... but be prepared to explain the difference between cynicism and scepticism.

So if a UK company wants to import stuff from the EU and sell it in UK he has to ensure it meets all the relevant UK regs and put on this new mark. That doesn't come for nothing, so the price goes up. Of course if the UK regs exactly match the EU regs he can just stick the label on, but what exactly is the point of all this bureaucracy.

I'll shut up now before it gets political

We have had 2 Skoda cars, the first was an early front engine job, good reliable car, easy to work on and cheap spare when required, after 4 trouble free years of motoring, we bought a second hand Felicia. The Felicia, took us to South of France 6 times. The last long trip was 4 weeks camping in Eastern Europe, via Belgium, Germany, Poland, Czech. The Skoda works is huge, they make machine tools as well VW Polo cars. We also visited Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Coldiz on the way home. John

It's odd, but whenever I try to reply to Michael's post and press "Add Posting" I get a page with the address:

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/generic/forums_admin.asp

which says: "Sorry - the page you requested cannot be displayed at this time. Please try again later. "

(Not temporary, been happening for a couple of hours).

Edited By Peter Greene on 25/01/2021 18:34:17

funny that SOD should mention skoda bolt quality we had the same trouble with zetor tractors ! noel

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None of my doing, I assure you

MichaelG.

No, I wasn't suggesting it was something you did, Michael ... doubt that you could.

I still can't post my response to your earlier message. I'll try posting just the quote without my response after this.

Edit ... tried to post just the quote and still it won't let me.

Edited By Peter Greene on 25/01/2021 22:19:28

Duncan -

You ask the point of the bureaucracy.

There are two.

One is the obvious, that of trying to ensure that goods are sold fit for purpose.

The other, and hinted at by contributors, is mere protectionism.

When the subject first appeared for us with the Pressure Equipment Regulations I bought copies of the two official documents. One is the law itself, seeming written by lawyers for lawyers who wouldn't know a toothed steel bar is a 'file' but had heard of pressure-vessels made from aluminium-alloy and stainless-steel. The other is a booklet by our own DTI and clearly written by professional engineers and legal advisors to help professional engineers to comply with the law.

It is clear from the UK-law version of the EU document, that product safety is the lesser consideration, versus trade-barrier and money-spinner for "Notified Bodies". The document even gives a little drawing showing the correct form and proportions of the CE label.

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I worked for some ten years at a lowly level in the scientific civil-service. Then we were sold off, rather dodgily that elicited Questions in Parliament, whereupon the non-ISO-registered Govt. agency that was still our primary customer insisted we had to be ISO-9001 accredited. We felt insulted because our work was not changing and They had always been happy with it.

We were all sent on short courses that explained that ISO9001 drew heavily on the old UK DEF-STAN system, a genuine technical guarantee scheme; but the Americans refuse to recognise any foreigners' standards although they tolerate ISO. However, ISO9001 is a guarantee not of quality necessarily, but of consistency.

The course failed to warn of us of ISO900x's deadening top-down stifling of initiative and even suggestions - "Sorry - can't. Not in the Procedures." It did though question the idea that low-quality work can gain ISO900x if it is consistent, and to written processes. Whilst theoretically true that would obviously be commercially self-destructive.

So we laboriously wrote hundreds of Guides, Work Instructions and Procedures, differing by degrees of prescription. The templates were credibly, allegedly copied from some American business-school text-book, so had 2 A4 pages of useful stuff, several of waffle and a few "intentionally blank" - no-one knew why - but added the real instructions as a mere Appendix!

I prepared one for a particular piece of lab equipment, and it became what I called "Auditor Bait" for the company's internal auditors to make them feel - and the WI look - useful enough to avoid awkward questions. I hung the folder invitingly from the equipment; and watched the posse, clip-boards drawn a la Clint Eastwood, come in, tick off the WI's existence, title and page-width Master Copy reference- number, and be happy.

They never knew because they never asked, that the instructions were out of date! For soon after my writing them my manager heavily modified the rig to perform the same tests in a very different way. Unfortunately the old Work Instructions were by now lithified in the 3rd draw of the 4th filing-cabinet of Room..., so the Auditor Bait remained just that. We who were paid to use it, knew how to use it.

The real, external auditors did give the company the ISO9001 ticket we'd been forced into striving for - but only after we'd stripped our newly-invented bureaucracy back to what was necessary.

So much for ISO9001. QA? Not really. It's a costly management-control scheme.

Michael Gilligan wrote

you must not place any marking or sign that may misconstrue the meaning or form of the UKCA marking to third parties.

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With my best internet wannabe lawyer hat on ... seems to me there's a lot of legal difference between saying "though shalt not copy our mark" and "thou shalt not use anything similar". Is this really any better than the CE mark situation?

(Michael, in order to finally get this to post I had to manually retype the quote. Quoting it in the normal fashion or even cutting/pasting it wouldn't work .... I assume you cut/pasted from the source? maybe there's some hidden character in it)

Edited By Peter Greene on 25/01/2021 22:32:40

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It’s probably not much better, Peter ... but I think it shows recognition of the ‘loophole’ that I was alluding to:

The design of the CE mark is explicit, and the widespread belief is that some are ‘passing off’ a similar [but clearly different] marking, BUT are reasonably safe in so doing because it said to have a different meaning ... and therefore it cannot be a fake.

The UK wording may strengthen our position ... Only time, and case-law will tell.

MichaelG.

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No idea, I’m afraid, Peter

... Yes, I copied and pasted from the .gov web-page ... but I don’t understand why that would prevent you from quoting my post.

MichaelG.

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Edit: __ I have just tried quoting my own post, and encountered the same problem that you did 

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 25/01/2021 23:01:15

Not much different from 70's BL cars, which were assembled from fasteners made from an engineering grade of cheese. A French one, as they were soft and weren't usable for long