Texas Vehicle Inspection

[mayor]

Does anyone have any insight?
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/texas-p ... spections/

[powerboatr]

about time
made no sense having vehicles with working lights, brakes and wipers once a year.
now the LEOs can do equipment violations, like lights etc

i was wondering if it was going to pass. one of the guys arguing against it , stated the shops in his district relied on the vehicle inspections to survive??
really 7.50 a vehicle wont pay the rent or insurance etc. most shops did it as a means for future repairs. on no inspection related items.
happy it passed,

for last 5 years i have not done one on my bus,
i do online registration and its OUT of state each time. supposed to catch them up when we come back....hmm ok its done


next we get rid of front plates.

[mayor]

about time
made no sense having vehicles with working lights, brakes and wipers once a year.
now the LEOs can do equipment violations, like lights etc

i was wondering if it was going to pass. one of the guys arguing against it , stated the shops in his district relied on the vehicle inspections to survive??
really 7.50 a vehicle wont pay the rent or insurance etc. most shops did it as a means for future repairs. on no inspection related items.
happy it passed,

for last 5 years i have not done one on my bus,
i do online registration and its OUT of state each time. supposed to catch them up when we come back....hmm ok its done


next we get rid of front plates.

I don't quite understand when it takes effect. My vehicle is due in August. Do I have to get it inspected since I'm in a non-inspect county?

[LDB415]

Great, just great. That many more unsafe vehicles roaming around waiting to wreck someone. Stupid move.

[AF-Odin]

It would be a stupid move to stop them if they were really inspecting. For the last several years at a local place, it has been drive into the bay, show them your insurance card, honk the horn, turn on the lights, switch to high beams, step on the brakes to see that the brake lights work, flip the turn signals in each direction, pay them $7.50, get your piece of paper and drive out, all in less than 5 minutes. Basically, a waste of time.

[TxRVer]

about time
made no sense having vehicles with working lights, brakes and wipers once a year.
now the LEOs can do equipment violations, like lights etc

i was wondering if it was going to pass. one of the guys arguing against it , stated the shops in his district relied on the vehicle inspections to survive??
really 7.50 a vehicle wont pay the rent or insurance etc. most shops did it as a means for future repairs. on no inspection related items.
happy it passed,

for last 5 years i have not done one on my bus,
i do online registration and its OUT of state each time. supposed to catch them up when we come back....hmm ok its done


next we get rid of front plates.

I go to a shop that does inspections only. I don't think they even do repairs for cars that fail. The $7.50 fee is the part that goes to the state. The rest of the fee you pay goes to the shop. I'll still have to go in for emissions testing since our county borders Dallas county. Right now, I think they just test the seal on the gas cap. I don't know how that works on new cars that don't have gas caps.

[Paladin]

Cars are getting more reliable. With LED's even headlights aren't needing the maintenance they once did. Annual inspection of new cars always seemed like an overkill to me... I was happy when they switched new cars to 2 years.

Apparently they were ineffective for reasons that make sense:
Do Mandatory Vehicle Inspections Really Make Us Safer?

In one study, investigators deliberately created eleven defects in a car, ranging from a missing tail light to a minor oil leak, and had it inspected by 40 different repair shops. In 55 percent of visits, two or fewer defects were detected. In only 10 percent of visits were the majority of the defects discovered. Clearly, mandatory inspections are no guarantee that unsafe vehicles will stay off the road.

Even if vehicle inspections worked perfectly, they’d still only affect a tiny fraction of car crashes. Federal investigators have found that mechanical component failures are responsible for only 2 percent of accidents. By contrast, driver errors account for 94 percent of all crashes.

[LDB415]

I see multiple vehicles every day with random non-working lights. At least some of those would be caught and corrected during inspection. Yes, some inspection locations are a sham. Many are not and at least they are catching some of the things that otherwise can lead to wrecks. We should have kept inspections.

[oohrah]

Great, just great. That many more unsafe vehicles roaming around waiting to wreck someone. Stupid move.

Not any different than 39 other states. CA has no safety inspection, so the base I was stationed at had their own safety inspection to get a base sticker. Stationed in MD, no safety inspection, just tailpipe.

[puma guy]

The state gave the police the "inspection" duty for many safety conditions long ago and they do nothing. I see rampant illegal lighting on vehicles that is ignored by police. Headlights and tail lights covered with almost black tinted plastics,license plate covers clear and darkened that are illegal in Texas and window tint that is too dark to see through even in bright sunlight and the same tint on some windshields. Blinding LED light bars on grills, hoods and even mounted above the windshield on the roof, not to mention vehicles with more front lights than allowed. )My daught has a friend with a jeep and I counted 24 front LED lights, including the factory installed limit of 8. I am a big supporter of police, but I'm convinced they feel stopping and citing vehicles for those sort of infractions is beneath them. Ain't nothing gonna change, just like property taxes. Rant over.

[philip964]

I’m in Harris county, doubt I will notice any change.

[srothstein]

I have not read the bill yet, so I am not sure exactly how this will work out. Currently, I pay 7.50 to the station that does the inspection and then 7.50 to the state on my registration bill. I think I will see a 7.50 savings each year but I am not sure if that will get added to the registration also or not.

I know that the police will have problems with it. The legal charge for defective equipment has always been operating a vehicle not in inspection ready condition. I need to see if they made the defective equipment a legal violation or not now.

[JustSomeOldGuy]

I don't quite understand when it takes effect. My vehicle is due in August. Do I have to get it inspected since I'm in a non-inspect county?

As I understand it, September 1, 2025

[03Lightningrocks]

Personally, I don't think a yearly inspection accomplishes a darned thing. Everything can be working perfectly on my truck during the inspection and two days later a headlight or tail light could go out. The horn could stop working or my just barely passing tires could finally go bald enough to fail next years inspection, a month after they just passed.

Mostly I get irritated by having my registration tied into a passing inspection. I have five vehicles and one motorcycle. I have had a situation where the darned battery had gone dead and I didn't know it because I rarely drive that vehicle. So I drop a new battery in, go down for the inspection and fail because I have to drive it 500 miles to get a good reading on their computer. Now I am stuck driving around with an expired registration while I try to chalk up miles on a vehicle rarely driven. It just trips all my triggers. Grrrrr... now get off my lawn!

Oh! I cannot figure out how the dedicated inspection stations pay the bills. We have them all over the place in Plano. None of them do repairs. Except maybe selling some windshield wipers. They must do one heck of a lot of inspections each day. These places are always in high rent areas. Heck, everywhere in Plano is high rent. They would have to be doing at least 75-100 inspections a day (which I seriously doubt it is even near that many). Just to pay rent and electricity. Not to mention payroll.

[JRG]

How will this affect trailer inspections? Will it stop them also?

Joe