Why should that be required? Let people do as they will and impose penalties for problematic behavior (including negligence). I lived in a state with safety inspections and AFAICT it was little more than yet another disproportionate speed bump for the poor and a complete waste of time for society at large.
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.
I live in a country with mandatory (mostly-)yearly car inspections (and all other motor vehicles).
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.
> 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.
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.
And yet somehow in the US states that don't have inspections things keep working. It's not as though we don't have statistics regarding the causes of traffic incidents.
"Keep working", or people get injured, or die at higher rates due to faulty vehicles on the road.
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
There is a world of difference between keeping working and working safely.
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?).
The safety part was exactly my point about the statistics. I've never come across anything to indicate that a noticable number of injuries or deaths are in any way related to equipment failure. The typical contenders are things like intoxication, drowsiness, distraction, and blatant recklessness or even anger.
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.
It’s definitely debatable, and is unlikely to be a primary factor in a significant number of events. It’s also hard to measure because the data is pretty bad.
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.
The UK also has much stricter training requirements prior to being granted a license, among other differences. I don't think we can pin all the differences on the yearly MOT.
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.
If you spend your time in the northeast and drive south semi-regularly, you notice it if you’re observant. There’s broken down cars and shredded tire debris everywhere.
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.
I’d disagree. It keeps cars with bald tires, faulty brakes and other defects off the road. Poor people who can’t afford these things shouldn’t be driving the cars.
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.
For emissions there is often nothing visually wrong with the car. So you’d essentially be giving up on enforcement if you didn’t require everyone to get their car checked at least every few years. Doing it every year is IMO overkill.
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.
> So you’d essentially be giving up on enforcement
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.
> 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.
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.
But that's 95% of cars that didn't need to be tested. All that the testing requirement does is reinforce the (correct) public's perception that it's a free money scheme. If the "check engine" light is not on in a modern car it's pretty much good to go.
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.
> But that's 95% of cars that didn't need to be tested.
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.
I've had a few cars fail emissions over the years and it was never because of the vapor. It was normally P0420 codes that weren't resolved from O2 sensors and other attempted fixes on 20 year old Hondas. Or fouled EGR airflow spaces needing cleaning. Or EGR/manifold baffles that would get stuck.
Police generally don’t issue fix it citations in the US in anywhere except for the most affluent neighborhoods where it’s unusual to see vehicles in poor condition.
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.
I have never met anyone who properly fixed an emissions problem, and I think that's what GP meant by willful violations. Any car old enough to have emissions problems isn't worth enough to fix properly, so you cheat it by doing things like buying a spacer for the O2 sensor.
Personally I'd be shocked if emissions inspections had a significant effect on total vehicle emissions, and I think that the most effective things are done at the manufacturer
I can personally name 3 people who had their catalytic converter replaced to pass an emissions inspection. Trying to cheat the system when they stick a hose on your tailpipe and test the emissions isn’t trivial.
The volume of incidents on the road make it entirely impossible to practically hold people accountable in that way.
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:
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.