Somewhere in New Hampshire today, someone is going to be told they can’t drive their vehicle unless they shell out hundreds of dollars to a mechanic who lies. They will know the mechanic is lying, they will go look at the part that the mechanic claims is faulty, and they might decide to take it somewhere else for a second opinion, but they won’t get their inspection sticker.
When they go to get their second opinion, the mechanic will pull up the VIN on the computer and say, “Sorry, this was inspected by another shop, we won’t touch it.” This means that in order to get the sticker, the driver needs to go back to the original shop and pay them to “fix” a part that doesn’t have any problems with it. The shop will win, and the Department of Safety will have its back and enable it to coerce innocent people into shelling out major bucks to fix imaginary problems.
Who would support such a system? The answer is obvious if you’re cynical enough: People who make money off of it. The auto dealers who can up-sell new vehicles by claiming the old vehicle “Won’t pass inspection” universally support mandatory inspections. Make no mistake, this is why auto dealers spend so much lobbying to keep these criminal enterprises running.
I have received many phone calls from people inquiring about the status of HB649 and eliminating vehicle inspections generally, but almost always, if someone is calling me in opposition to the bill, they are either a mechanic or a car salesman. The people calling to support the bill run the gamut from young adults who couldn’t get to work because of a failed inspection to widows who are easy prey for the scam. It isn’t just people with limited resources, either. It doesn’t matter what your socio-economic background is, how old you are, whether you’re driving a truck or a sedan, Ford or Chevy; what seems to unite all is that none of us like getting ripped off.
I’ll acknowledge that some people support the vehicle inspection mandate who are not making money off of it, but they are not very vocal about it. It’s not a make-or-break issue for them. They’re often mistakenly of the belief that vehicle inspections lead to safer roads. That conclusion, while incorrect, isn’t outside the universe of reasonable hypotheses. Without any additional context, it seems like a safe guess that if you are forcing people to get their vehicle inspected every year, then the roads will be safer.
When they discover that the majority of states have gotten rid of their vehicle inspection programs without a problem, and that many of them are in even colder parts of the U.S. with roads saltier than ours, they often change their mind.
I spoke to a man recently who thought that the emissions testing was the most important aspect. I informed him that they don’t even inspect the emissions, all they do is check to see if your “Check Engine” light is on. I also explained that the quality of the air in New Hampshire today is determined mostly by the quality of the air in Vermont yesterday. Even if the emissions program did manage to spruce up the air a tad (which it doesn’t), all we’re doing is slightly reducing the ozone for the Atlantic Ocean.
For many of those who haven’t been bitten by sticker scammers, I suspect that they have a mechanic as a family friend. For the rest of us, research and debate about this bill has made one thing clear: The best indicator of an honest mechanic is that they don’t perform state inspections. If they don’t, and are still in business, the quality of their work is what keeps them afloat.
The second best indicator is to look for the inspection station that is so busy they don’t have time to rip people off. This is not a guarantee they’ll pass your car, but it does mean they don’t have much incentive to invent reasons to fail your car.
Hopefully the desperate search for an honest mechanic becomes a thing of the past: The language of HB649 was put into the budget trailer bill by the NH House. The reason for this is simple: I knew when I put in this bill that we’d have to. The Senate would find a way to kill the bill otherwise. How do I know? Because I’ve sponsored “Mild” reforms in the past, such as HB1637. What this bill did was reduce the requirements for inspections. These reasonable reforms were killed in the Senate. Why? Perhaps it is because the more ways that exist to fail a vehicle, the more ways there are to make money off a driver.
The solution is to stop with the half-measures, remove the concept of “reform” from your mind. The representatives of the industry have been absolutely set on ensuring that every vehicle can “fail” an inspection for something. Their income depends on finding reasons to fail cars, and they will oppose anything that reduces the total number of victims. We’ve tried compromise. We’ve tried reform. Rather than hitting the brakes, it’s time to drop gears and floor it.
