Faulty breathalyser recall yet to affect Bay

There has been a nation-wide recall of the Drager 7510 breathalyser used by police due to a fault.

New Zealand Police have not ruled out whether a nationwide recall of faulty breathalysers will affect Bay of Plenty drivers caught drink-driving.

The Drager 7510 breath-screening device has been one of several tools used by police to determine whether someone has been drink-driving.

On Tuesday, police announced a nationwide recall of the devices after finding a technical issue with some. About 80 evidential readings provided by the devices tested so far are believed to have been affected.

New Zealand Police spokesman Ross Henderson said it was still too early to establish whether any of the faulty breathalysers had come from the Bay of Plenty.

"At the moment we are still in the process of getting devices in for testing and figuring out which ones have faults," Mr Henderson said.

Four hundred of the devices were progressively rolled out by police during July. The fault was found in an internal random spot test. All Drager 7510 devices used by police were being recalled and tested, which was expected to take about a week, Mr Henderson said.

National manager of road policing Superintendent Steve Greally said while the issue was being investigated, police would continue to test drink drivers as normal using the Drager 6510 breath screening device, a previous model which was still in widespread use.

"Operationally, there will be no change to our continued enforcement of drink-drive offences, as testing machines in booze buses and stations are unaffected. This means anyone caught driving while impaired can expect to be dealt with in the same way," Mr Greally said. "As soon as the issue was discovered we made contact with Drager and sought urgent assurance that this problem will be fixed.

"In the meantime, as a precautionary step, we have removed all of the devices from service, which have now been sent to Drager for further testing to determine the exact nature and scale of the issue."