Outdated auto inspection laws appear more related to culture than cold
Every time legislators propose ending New Hampshire’s annual auto inspection mandate, opponents allege that inspections are common in Northern states because cold weather hazards (road salt, frost heaves) make them necessary.
In fact, most cold-weather states, like most states overall, don’t require annual auto inspections. Mapping the states that require annual inspections reveals that culture likely plays a bigger role than weather.
Of the 11 states (by our count) that require annual auto safety inspections (not emissions inspections), nine are clustered on the Eastern seaboard, running from North Carolina to Maine. Only Hawaii and Louisiana are outside of this stretch of original American colonies.
Of the 10 coldest U.S. states, only three require any auto safety inspections: Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
Not a single Canadian border state from Ohio to Washington requires auto safety inspections. No state West of Pennsylvania and north of Missouri does.
There’s simply no truth to the claim that cold weather states adopt auto safety inspections while warm-weather states don’t.
Auto inspection mandates are clustered not in cold-weather states, but among the tradition-bound states along the East Coast. From Maine to North Carolina, only Connecticut has no inspection mandate for passenger vehicles. West Virginia and New Jersey have biennial inspections rather than annual.
The inspection mandates end, not surprisingly, in South Carolina, rather than Virginia. North Carolina and Virginia are closer to Maryland than the Deep South when it comes to the level of state regulations.
Auto inspection mandates pop up again in Louisiana and Hawaii (annual), then Missouri, Colorado and California (biennial).
The map suggests that culture and traditions play a more important role than weather in determining which states adopt auto safety inspection mandates.
New Hampshire’s inspection law dates from 1931. Despite our reputation as a libertarian stronghold in the Northeast, New Hampshire’s political culture is one in which existing laws are changed, if at all, slowly and deliberately, not suddenly.
Our political culture also is one that values re-assessing outdated laws and finding ways to maximize economic freedom. Thanks to a nearly century-old law, New Hampshire finds itself in the company of states like New York and Massachusetts.
New Hampshire’s auto inspection mandate is stricter than California’s and New Jersey’s. It is on par with New York’s, Vermont’s and Massachusetts’. Famously left-wing and highly regulatory states including Illinois, Washington, Oregon and Connecticut are among the 33 states that don’t require auto safety inspections at all.
When the state’s auto inspection mandate was adopted, automobiles were unreliable and had short life expectancies (about 7 years). Today, the average automobile is more than 12 years old and can be expected to reach 200,000 miles.
The decline in both accidents and fatalities since the 1970s, along with the massive gains in auto safety and reliability, undermine the case for maintaining a 1930s law that only a handful of states still have—and that is not associated with improvements in highway safety, as we pointed out here.
At some point, New Hampshire will end this mandate that has outlived its usefulness and that imposes heavy costs on motorists without any corresponding gains in safety. The question is whether the end will come before or after the law hits its 100th anniversary.
