* New York
* Massachussets
* Vermont
Has the car never been inspected before, since it's new? Then it'd make sense that it'd be inspected before allowed on the road, not sure this is such a big deal?
I'm currently sitting and thinking about importing a second-hand car from another country, neighboring country also in Schengen, EU and EEA, just like us, even if that car passed all their local inspections, I'm gonna have to make it pass through our local inspection before I can register it here. Kind of felt like it'd be similar with new cars, but also, I don't know.
By making the seller lose their license if they sell cars that are not roadworthy? Why should the risk and liability be on the buyer?
"Safety Inspections" were generally just a grift for third-party repairshops to collect free money and I couldn't be happier that they are no longer a thing.
Be aware that "safety" and "emissions" are different. Emissions testing is still required biannually for newish vehicles and yearly for older ones.
[1] https://www.deseret.com/2017/3/9/20607904/lawmakers-remove-r...
We have yearly inspections in the UK (twice yearly for any "public" carrying, like a taxi). If your vehicle is in working order you only pay the £39 fee
My girlfriend almost got swindled by this. She needed brake pads and rotors, and they tried to slide unnecessary fluid changes and other stuff. Like replacing a $14 air filter for $120.
1. The safety inspections were never rigorous to begin with. Everyone who drives a piece of shit car in a state with safety inspections “knows a guy”. And in many urban areas, you can just drive around without an inspection.
2. Police very rarely sit at the roadside doing root cause analysis after an accident. If somebody loses control of their vehicle, they write a report for insurance or at most write them a ticket for failure to maintain control. So of course you don’t see a measurable increase in accidents due to faulty equipment. It’s because they rarely look for faulty equipment after an accident. So they aren’t measuring it.
I do see the merit of inspecting larger trailers (such as for boats) once a year given the combined increased likelihood of incompetence and risk to life when things go wrong. But even then I think it doesn't actually accomplish much in practice. The time and effort would be better spent on targeted public education campaigns, possibly mandatory.
For emissions, again who cares. Regulations imposed on the high volume manufacturers broadly solves all the issues that are easy to solve. The rest are either willful violations or collectors. The latter is technological in nature and inevitably gets grandfathered for both safety and emissions everywhere I've lived.
As to safety inspections it’s not a very large effect, but they do save lives and the expense is generally rather small. Yes it impacts the poor more, but that’s because getting unsafe vehicles fixed or off the road is kind of the point.
Yes, that is precisely what I was suggesting. At least in the general case. Spot enforcement of notable cases when witnessed (such as the aforementioned coal rolling) seems like a good idea to me.
It comes down to the cost benefit tradeoff. Most cars will be used as sold, will be kept in good repair, and will eventually be scrapped due to a failure unrelated to the emissions system. I'm entirely unconvinced that regular testing leads to an overall improvement large enough to matter assuming sufficient requirements were imposed on the vehicle at the time of manufacture.
> it impacts the poor more, but that’s because getting unsafe vehicles fixed or off the road is kind of the point.
That's not what I meant. Try getting a safety inspection in a poor neighborhood. The places are booked out and you probably can't afford the time off work even once you do manage to reserve a slot. Or you end up waiting in line for a few hours. At least that was my experience.
On top of that I doubt it catches many worthwhile violations. People are quite good at looking out for their own lives and pocketbooks.
And again there's spot enforcement. I've lived in states without safety inspections and never felt unsafe. The police would issue "fix it" tickets if they saw anything they thought was truly unsafe after which it was on you to sort it out with the court.
Only ~95% of cars pass emissions tests last year (it varies by state). As each car is tested several times over its lifespan you’ll find the majority of IC cars eventually need something fixed to reduce smog.
This isn’t some wildly inefficient system it’s actually quite effective at improving air quality.
When cars do need an emissions related fix, it's almost always that little charcoal canister that people flood with gas because nobody told them why it's a bad idea to top off the tank after the first click.
That would only be true if the government was aware of which cars were in the 95% ahead of time. The fact that so many cars fail means even the driver isn’t sure let alone the government.
Even cars significantly newer than the average age of cars on the road regularly fail the emissions tests without any obvious issues ahead of time. Which means without testing you don’t know which cars will pass.
You can go to any poor neighborhood in the US and find visible safety issues with vehicles in a matter of minutes. Police in poor neighborhoods have more pressing issues to be dealing with.
Regardless, the police aren’t equipped to be dealing with vehicle safety or emissions issues anyway. They can’t tell whether a vehicle driving down the street has blown shocks, faulty brakes, or ball joints that are ready to pop off the vehicle. Most of these issues aren’t visible unless you have the car up on a lift. As long as your exhaust is quiet and your lights generally work, you’re unlikely to be cited by police anywhere in the US.
People with faulty equipment are crashing every day in the US and it’s never recorded that it’s the cause. In the vast majority of cases, there’s no way anyone would ever know.
Many time you don't even know that there's an issue and they only find it during the inspection. Handbrake works only on one side, normal brakes don't work properly on one of the wheels, there's play in one of the joints or tie rods, etc.
You park, pull the handbrake, you have no idea that if you parked on an incline, your car would roll downhill, but because they noticed it during an inspection, you get that fixed. At the same time, you're forced to replace all the blown lightbulbs etc., even the ones not used daily (fog lights, etc.), since they check those too. Many people don't even notice their brake lights not working.
US road infrastructure is pretty bad at the best of times, highways are devoid of safety and notification systems. Hence why MASSIVE pile ups are a thing
I don't know about technical and emmission inspections in the US but in our country they also check stuff like properly aligned headlights so you don't blind other cars, the brakes, geometry etc., and I'm pretty sure without those check the cars would drive on the roads and cause safety issues.
> For emissions, again who cares.
Well for example removing a DPF from a diesel car which was popular sport for a time and driving such a car in a densely populated area can be considered directly causing cancer, so a lot of people care about this. And only spot checking for this is ineffective and expensive, though it is done in some countries anyway (Austria I think?).
Headlights is the only thing I'll agree with you on as being terrible in the US (at least all the parts I've lived in and visited). It's purely a matter of enforcement though. People replace the stock bulbs with arbitrary stuff they ordered that's absolutely blinding and the police seem to just ignore it. It's incredibly frustrating.
What I meant by spot enforcement was responding to credible reports or opportunistic observations with surprise physical inspections. Basically the same thing they do for equipment condition in the states that don't have safety inspections. If there's black smoke billowing from your tailpipe or other obviously faulty equipment I think it's reasonable for the police to investigate that.
As an example, your tire could blow out and cause you to hit a drunk pedestrian. It would be flagged as an alcohol related crash. Police are mostly interested in violations and liability, and you are responsible. Unless it’s a fatality, nobody will even ask if your failure to stop was related to poor brakes or bald tires.
In my opinion, the only clear stat is how many people are dead. Everything else requires domain expertise to interpret.
That’s five times higher!
For those that don’t know these are all the checks done yearly to every passenger car over 3 years old. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/car-parts-checked...
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I would argue it's more effective to enforce stuff like this with mandatory periodical inspections than to leave it to random police checks. There are several reasons for that - the police are already doing lot of things, so they might not care; 'normalisation of deviation' etc.
Inspection is one driver of that. Salt eats cars up north which limits daily drivers to 8-10 years which is probably a bigger one. But a significantly higher number of vehicles aren’t really road worthy.
Last year the handbrake was like you say, only on one side. And the seatbelt mount was weak.
This year it uncovered two gaping holes near the suspension struts.
I can't imagine not having that inspected at least yearly!
Do any of these states even actually check for these things? Texas used to have required safety and emissions requirements. It was largely tires aren't completely shot and seem somewhat straight (alignment was definitely not a requirement though), essential lighting is functional (headlights, taillights, turn signals if originally equipped), wipers are OK. Emissions was a check of the gas cap and an OBD-II scan. For motorcycles there was a braking test but I never saw a similar test done on a car.
That said I think it shouldn't have gone away. Personally I think if you're going to operate such a dangerous thing in public it should have a lot of scrutiny. I've seen too many cars experience some kind of crazy failure from poor maintenance end up hurting others on the highways around me. Having a desk job at a window facing two major highways for a long time, you see so much injury and death, so much of it avoidable.
In my country (slovenia), yes. They put the car on a plate, check from below, put it on rollers, check both sets of brakes, exhaust, lights, etc.
example (oldtimer, but still, the process is the same): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epIEsExVNIc
Motor carriers have a totally different regulatory regime that has a direct influence on highway safety. The issues there are due to the varying jurisdictions.
If you are rear ended at a stop light because someone behind you had faulty tires or brakes, nobody is disassembling the car to try to prove negligence. If the incident was serious enough that the police even respond, the last thing they’re going to be doing on scene is measuring your brake pads.
Most cars do indeed meet emissions regulations. From the essay Million Dollar Murray [0]:
> In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.
> Stedman is a chemist and automobile emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. “Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It’s the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions—the computer’s not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst died. It’s not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It’s not just old cars. It’s new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year.”
When I moved to Denver, there were inspections (I think annually). Later, they were eliminated and now there are remote sensors set up along side various onramps. The main sensor is on one side, a box about the size of a suitcase, and the other side is a mirror, since the sensor aims a laser and measures the absorption lines of what comes out of the exhaust (and takes a photo of your license plate). If your car is a gross polluter, you get a letter from the DMV telling you to get it checked.
Anecdotally, I used to have a late 80s Geo Spectrum. When it failed emissions, after attempting to repair it, it turned out that the reason the oxygen sensor failed was due to a crack in the exhaust manifold. The way the engine was arranged, if left untreated, the crack in the manifold would direct exhaust gases into the radiator which is why there were so many engine fires (resulting in a total loss of the vehicle).
Notes:
0 - Written by Malcolm Gladwell, this essay is about "power law distributions", where a few percent produce wildly different results:
https://housingmatterssc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mill...
That reminds me, I am overdue for a smog check...
CA doesn’t require annual smogs, but once your car is a certain age, it’s at least biennial. I just did ours last week.
Jesus christ
The reason we don't view it with the gravity it deserves is because driving is required. For most people, the options are drive or be homeless.
You know what happens when you call it in? The government sends a letter to the registered address of the truck saying, basically "Hey! Your emissions are very wasteful, you should get that checked out!". Glad California seems to have some teeth to the emissions laws.
They will never cease to boggle my tiny mind
I'm sure it's just as capable as the bulletproof glass.
https://air.arb.ca.gov/Forms/VehicleComplaint/SmokingVehicle
Things that didn't happen for 200 please
In the real world, sometimes grownups have to actively do things to make their worlds nicer. We can’t all just sit around being cynical or nothing ever gets done.
The speed limits are also all high. They get up to 50 mph in as many places as possible.
It also doesn't help that they've got some of the worst road marking of any state I've been in. There were a lot of roads where it was simply unclear how many lanes were supposed to exist.
Now imagine throwing a bike into all this.
I don't think it's so much aggression as it is really really terrible infrastructure.
Also, FTR, Texans are actually pretty polite drivers (at least they were circa 2011 in Dallas area).
As one that has been hit and coal rolled, I'll stipulate that I have a biased take that would disagree. I get that people in Irving are probably not as used to bicycles, but where I'm at is one the most popular places for biking (white rock lake). So drivers in this area are definitely used to bikes. These people to me are the meme version of the MAGA crowd. They're also the people that have no qualms doing 50mph in a 30mph zone. Infrastructure or not, these people are these people
These are separate issues. Both are real.
And the sheer amount of hatred he gets, alongside the threats. You'd think he was head of ISIS or something