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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

US restrictions on vehicle imports seem very odd from a British perspective.

Over here, we can freely import pretty much anything. If it's more than 10 years old, you just register it. If it's less than 10 years old, you can still bring it in as a personal import, but it'll need to pass a slightly enhanced version of the normal annual inspection. It's a point of principle that any vehicle that passes inspection should be road legal, hence oddities like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paIGBOlkQr0

Because we're a right-hand-drive country, Japanese imports are commonplace. If you want a Kei car or a JDM-only luxury minivan, you can just have one. That taken-for-granted freedom gives me a certain degree of empathy for the 2nd amendment lobby.

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You can have lots of weird cars like that in the US too, but only as long as you START with a normal car and then mess with it. Most states don't have anything like the MOT (or if they do, they only check emissions and nothing to do with safety), so once the car is originally registered as a VW Golf or whatever, what you do with it after that is your own business.

As is typical with US regulation, it's a "worst of all worlds" hodgepodge that makes no logical sense.

A quick Google shows that only 15 states have vehicle inspections. The concept seems completely foreign (and a waste of time?) to me.

Living in Ohio (no inspection "rust belt" state), I saw a minivan's axle pop loose ahead of me on the highway, which sent it into the concrete barrier pretty much instantly. Perhaps you don't have rust issues where you live, but requiring some minimum mechanical function to register a car should be everywhere in my opinion. Generally inspections are either mechanical/safety or emissions. Emissions are based on the car model in every state I've lived in, so as long as you don't modify your car to blow smoke it'll pass. Mechanical inspections are to make sure there's no major rust, the brakes work, the lights work, tires aren't bald, etc.

Exported used car from Japan is considered to good quality, that's partially thanks to vehicle inspection system per 1/2 year.

Unfortunately - that's the only way to force some drivers to get their car brakes fixed.

The UK has less than half as many road deaths than the US, even after factoring in the difference in miles driven per year. Annual inspection is one of the reasons for that.

There are some perfectly reasonable arguments against the cost-effectiveness of mandatory vehicle inspection, but I have some doubts about the validity of those arguments. Road safety and traffic law enforcement involve a lot of complex interrelated factors; Creating a culture of road safety is difficult to distil into discrete interventions.

There's a libertarian argument that driving a car with bald tires is a matter of individual liberty, but obviously that's a vastly broader argument than the question of mandatory inspection. If you're going to have laws against driving a car with bald tires, it's less onerous and more effective to primarily enforce those laws through administrative rather than criminal justice mechanisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Not having vehicle inspections is a concept that's completely foreign to European me. It's literally letting people very lightly educated in how to operate heavy machinery operate heavy machinery that at one (long gone) point probably worked as it should.

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