Annual state auto inspections are normally just easy money grabs for the state. There’s not a lot of life threatening problems that are caught in an auto inspection.
State mandated inspections are vigorously supported by auto repair lobbies.
When I was a poor 16-18 year old, “getting a sticker” was always a challenge. I once put one of my parents’ cars up on blocks so I could put the wheels from their car onto mine. I then raced into town, got inspected, then hurried home and put the right wheels on the right cars before my parents got home.
As far as I know, my dad never figured out how my car with bald tires passed inspection.
Maybe that’s just a Texas thing. If there are that many deathtraps without inspections you’d think I’d have seen them during the years I lived in Washington. It would be interesting to see if anyone has done research; are states with inspections any safer than those without?
No. If safety inspections reduced accidents, I can guarantee you that auto insurers would require all insured vehicles to have an annual inspection. It would be in their economic interest. And I know that they have studied it.
Many state legislators in states which require state inspections have attempted to have these programs taken off the books to find themselves fighting a brick wall. Between the amount of revenue the states and counties collect on the inspection fees and the influence of the auto industry lobbyists with many legislators.
Makes sense. I live in Ontario which always seems to be looking for things to legislate, but even here safety inspections are only required when selling a car. But emissions tests are required every two years. Seems reasonable because emissions systems do break down in ways that are easy to ignore as they often don’t have much of an apparent effect on anything, whereas any reasonable driver would probably prefer to have brakes that work and wheels that don’t fall off as a matter of personal self-interest.
In NJ, IIRC, besides emissions they checked lights, your horn, your windshield wipers, and there was a brakes test. None of these are very subtle. And it is done once a year. I saw more cars driving in NJ with one headlight than I do in California.
In DC you get your car inspected at a city run facility. If you fail the inspection, you can either get the car fixed wherever you like and get it re-inspected, or you can get it fixed at a list of approved shops in the city and then you are not required to get it re-inspected, if they fix the issue, the car is considered passed.
All that would mean is that they didn’t find it profitable to lobby for state inspections, not that they don’t reduce accidents.
This study points out that the reason some states (OK and NJ) want to end their inspection systems is because they’d save money. So, I’m not going to accept claims that the inspection system is a money grab held in place to squeeze our nuts without something to back it up.
The same study also points out that it’s hard to establish that the systems reduce accidents partly due to the fact that the actual cause of the accident usually isn’t established and tracked. The police and insurance company are only interested in who hit who in the what in the vast majority of accidents.
The problem with quantifying the safety effects of inspections is that the number of crashes caused by mechanical failures is really small. The number caused by mechanical failures that would have been prevented by a cursory periodic safety inspection is undoubtedly much smaller still.
I do think inspections made a certain amount of sense back in the days when cars would routinely start seeing serious structural rust issues within their first decade (which is also probably why safety inspections are mostly a Northeastern phenomenon.) Unlike things like brakes and tires, rust doesn’t usually cause crashes but it can make other crashes much worse. It’s also something that tended to get overlooked because cars in rusty areas always have a certain amount of rusty patina, so it isn’t obvious if you’re not specifically looking for it. Of course for rust issues, it’s only a conflict of interest if the inspecting shop is also a car dealer!
I think you misunderstand how auto insurance companies make money.
No, I don’t misunderstand that at all.
I have, however had several accidents. In none of them was the actual cause established beyond which driver was at fault. So, where would they get the data that they based their decision on?
Using this data and this chart, I get an average of 11.16 deaths per 100,000 population and 1.13 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles in states that have periodic vehicle inspections, and 11.51 deaths per 100,000 population and 1.13 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles in states that don’t.
Now this doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of things that a vehicle inspection might influence, but at least as far as death is concerned, the difference seems low, well within a standard deviation.
Well, as the study I cited before points out, the differences in traffic enforcement between the states makes comparisons like that difficult. Oklahoma and Arkansas (no inspections) certainly enforces the speed limit much more strictly than Texas (safety and emissions inspections).