Why Are Vehicle Inspections Really Necessary?
Many of our Cooks Repair Center clients ask us why a state vehicle inspection is really necessary, and what is it for, so we decided to write this post to address this question as best as we can.
Most state laws that require regular safety inspections for vehicles were passed over 75 years ago, which, at a time motor vehicle fatalities per mile traveled were around 8 times higher than in the 21st century. This is mostly because vehicles lacked many of the safety features used today. A growing number of states, 35 at last count, in addition to the District of Columbia, have done away with these regulations, and the rest of the country needs to follow suit.
But don’t mandatory vehicle inspections keep unsafe cars off the road, thus reducing accidents?
In fact, when researchers look in more detail into the data, they consistently fail to find any significant reduction in vehicle injuries or fatalities in states that use mandatory inspections. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office, which is the Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog, discovered that existing research has been unable to establish any causal relationship between inspections and crash rates.
When North Carolina officials examined how efficient mandatory inspections were in 2008, they concluded that almost 3 decades of research failed to conclusively show that mechanical defects were a significant cause of vehicle accidents, or that safety inspections had any impact in reducing accident rates.
Nebraska also discovered that the number of crashes due to vehicle defects actually decreased after the mandatory state vehicle inspection program ended in 1982.
If vehicle safety inspections had any noticeable impact on accident rates, you would expect auto insurers to put their price accordingly, providing lower premiums to drivers in states that still have mandatory inspections. However, that not what the data is showing. If anything, states that do not have these mandates tend to have lower auto insurance rates than the national average.
So, you decide, if you would like to know information about the services and products we have to offer you, and if you live in or around the Shippensburg, PA region, please feel free to call us at (717) 300-3236 anytime.