Toyman! said:
In reply to theruleslawyer :
We had annual safety inspections up until 1995. It was determined that the inspection process did nothing to make vehicles safer and mostly led to corruption and the fleecing of people who didn't know better.
For the longest time, I would stop at the local inspection shop late in the afternoon when the owner was 3/4 drunk, offer him $20 in cash and he'd hand me a sticker. The only inspection was to make sure the $20 was real.
Yah, that would be about my expectation with independent ones. You'd have to have in house inspectors to make it meaningful.
OTOH there are plenty of people running around with stolen/expired/fake plates and no license or insurance. You'd probably just drive a lot of the people who can't pass into that camp.
cyow5 said:
As distracted driving becomes more prevalent, I imagine that further reduces any correlation between accidents and inspections. Whether your brakes work or not doesn't matter if you don't hit them...
But more cars will also have AEB, I think that prevented a guy in a new Audi from rearending my Toyobaru a couple years ago.
cyow5
Reader
10/10/24 11:43 a.m.
GameboyRMH said:
cyow5 said:
As distracted driving becomes more prevalent, I imagine that further reduces any correlation between accidents and inspections. Whether your brakes work or not doesn't matter if you don't hit them...
But more cars will also have AEB, I think that prevented a guy in a new Audi from rearending my Toyobaru a couple years ago.
Yeah, the OEMs have absolutely been working towards combating distracted driving. That does raise an interesting point though - should these systems be added to safety inspections? As drivers' aids become more prevalent, so does driver complacency. And that's fine when the aids are working but we may start to see cars with signficant age and some dead radars. Radars are expensive, so people who buy a cheap luxury car may put up with it, all the while being used to a system that used to work.
NJ used to have a safety inspection that was surprisingly thorough. They would check headlight aim, brakes, and front suspension. Brakes were tested with four plates in the floor - the inspector would drive forwards and brake abruptly. That test actually caught a problem in one of my cars. They had lift in the floor that would raise the front end so they could check for looseness in the suspension components. That one caused some anxiety when I had a 996 GT3 with a plastic tray underneath. Fortunately, they had an exception list and my car was on it. They had another machine that tested if shocks were still working.
They had a separate test for lifted pickups too, with angled ramps of some kind. Wheels poking outside the bodywork was an instant fail. Rust holes were a fail. Bald tires.
It's emissions only now. I recall when they updated the law, they announced annual savings of ... $17MM. A rounding error.
At the time, I expected to start seeing the kind of derelict hoopties I've seen in FL but it never really happened. What DID happen was that every 3rd pickup and Jeep is now lifted with tires sticking 6" outside the body to make sure rocks get thrown as far as possible.
