What Does A Vehicle Inspection Check Involve?

Getting your vehicle checked for safety factors annually or bi-annually is mandatory in 15 of the 50 states in the U.S

. Many advocate that it should be mandatory in every state as it currently leads to confusion and to some extent is very hard to enforce.

For example, if you get stopped in Virginia and your vehicle is registered in that state or any of the other 14 states where vehicle testing is mandatory, you have to be able to prove your vehicle is tested. If you can't you can be fined and in some instances your vehicle can be impounded. However, if you get stopped in Virginia and your vehicle is registered in a state where there isn't any mandatory vehicle safety testing, then you are perfectly legal and well within your rights to carry on with your journey.

So there you are driving around in a state where legislation states vehicles must have safety inspections, but there could be thousands of vehicles from other states without the legislation that are potentially dangerous.

Most of the 15 states impose annually safety checks; three states allow inspections every 24 months. Although 24 months is better than having no inspection, a lot can change over a two year period, indeed a lot can happen to a car over a one year period.

The type of inspection needed does vary, depending on the state. However, you can be sure that the test in most, if not all the states, where mandatory vehicle inspection applies are fairly similar. For example, important things like the braking system, suspension, steering and hydraulic systems will be carefully checked. The state of the vehicles tires will also form part of the inspection; tires cause a lot of accidents annually. Other areas will involve the chassis, bodywork, fuel and electrical systems. It's likely than your windshield wipers will be checked along with windshield washer system. Another item that will form part of the safety checks will be the exhaust system; your vehicle will have to pass an exhaust emission test.

Road safety is essential and everything that can be done to reduce accidents needs to be done. Part of that involves ensuring that vehicles using the road are safe and the only way that can be ensured is by having mandatory testing imposed across all states.

Recently some statistics were compared between states with and states without vehicle testing procedures in place. The information was obtained from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Additional data was also collected from the various state inspection programs. Quite simply, there were fewer accidents in states that had inspections programs to those that didn't. More importantly, the fatality rate was less for those states that had mandatory vehicle inspection.

Taking Pennsylvania as one example and using the various data sources to build a model it was found that if the state didn't have the vehicle inspection program in 2008 there would have been 169 more fatal accidents during the year. In terms of year on year percentages it means that there is about an 11 percent reduction in fatal accidents as a result of the inspection program. Multiply this by the other 49 states and your can easily work out how important it is for inspection programs to be implemented.

by: Lawrence Reaves

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