The North Carolina vehicle safety inspection system is broken. According to an article in the Charlotte Observer great disparities exist statewide. Depending on where North Carolinians choose to inspect their vehicles, they could possibly get a nod and a wink or need to open their wallets very wide.
In North Carolina safety and emission inspections are conducted by full service repair shops as well as inspection-only stations which do inspections but don’t repair vehicles. Individuals working in the industry and interviewed by the newspaper said that the inspection-only facilities tend to pass more vehicles to promote high volume and repeat customers. Others said that chain operations, which repair cars as well as inspect them, fail vehicles at a higher rate to keep their service bays busy.
The study that was performed jointly with The (Raleigh) News and Observer considered over 23 million inspections performed over a three year period. The newspapers found that the average inspection takes five to six minutes with hundreds of garages taking only one or two minutes for an operation that the state estimates should last about 20 minutes.
The state’s Inspection Procedure for Safety Equipment requires that the vehicle be raised on a lift to facilitate the inspection of the undercar area. In addition, the inspecting technician must drive the vehicle, even if it’s in the course of placing it on the lift, to test for even braking. Other safety items earmarked for inspection are the exhaust system, lights, steering, wipers and horn.
Considering the rules for the brake system alone any reasonable person would question how an inspection of such critical safety importance could be accomplished in even 5 or 6 minutes. Under the regulations the inspector must check for brake pedal travel, confirm that the master cylinder is full, inspect the brake hoses, look for seepage from other hydraulic parts, test the parking brake and inspect its cables and remove a wheel whenever there is an audible indication that the brake lining is worn out.
That, of course, only accounts for the brake portion of the inspection. The newspapers found that of the state’s roughly 5800 inspection sites less than 5 percent spend an average of twenty minutes on an inspection.
A wide disparity in rejection rates seems to indicate that inspectors have either too much discretion in the pass/fail decision or that there is another agenda at work. One repair shop in Charlotte was said to have a 33 percent rejection rate while another on the same block rejected less than two percent.
During a three year period in one rural county inspectors passed all but two of the approximately 14,000 vehicles they inspected. The report said that part of this skewed approval rate is because car owners and shops in these locales have closer relationships and often repair vehicles prior to the inspection. Another shop owner reported that his personnel pre-screens vehicles often sending them to a neighboring auto parts store to purchase needed items, which would also distort the data. For that reason the DMV discourages these practices.
It seems that the program has lost its focus. The lack of uniformity is the result of the absence of accountability as each participating party pursues its own priorities, whether it’s the registrants wishing to keep their cars on the road as cheaply as possible, the full service garages hoping to generate repair revenue, or the inspection-only stations seeking to optimize volume.
What should be about the safety of the driving community has evolved into a tug of war between groups with special interests at stake. The state needs to rethink the entire inspection process and add to it verifiable accountability and enforce strict sanctions for offenders.
Sources:
Fred Clasen-Kelly, David Raynor and Gavin Off, N.C. Auto Inspections | Failing The Test , Charlotte Observer.com
N.C. DOT, Safety & Emissions Inspection Regulations Manual