And yet somehow in the US states that don't have inspections things keep working. It's not as though we don't have statistics regarding the causes of traffic incidents.
"Keep working", or people get injured, or die at higher rates due to faulty vehicles on the road.
US road infrastructure is pretty bad at the best of times, highways are devoid of safety and notification systems. Hence why MASSIVE pile ups are a thing
There is a world of difference between keeping working and working safely.
I don't know about technical and emmission inspections in the US but in our country they also check stuff like properly aligned headlights so you don't blind other cars, the brakes, geometry etc., and I'm pretty sure without those check the cars would drive on the roads and cause safety issues.
> For emissions, again who cares.
Well for example removing a DPF from a diesel car which was popular sport for a time and driving such a car in a densely populated area can be considered directly causing cancer, so a lot of people care about this. And only spot checking for this is ineffective and expensive, though it is done in some countries anyway (Austria I think?).
The safety part was exactly my point about the statistics. I've never come across anything to indicate that a noticable number of injuries or deaths are in any way related to equipment failure. The typical contenders are things like intoxication, drowsiness, distraction, and blatant recklessness or even anger.
Headlights is the only thing I'll agree with you on as being terrible in the US (at least all the parts I've lived in and visited). It's purely a matter of enforcement though. People replace the stock bulbs with arbitrary stuff they ordered that's absolutely blinding and the police seem to just ignore it. It's incredibly frustrating.
What I meant by spot enforcement was responding to credible reports or opportunistic observations with surprise physical inspections. Basically the same thing they do for equipment condition in the states that don't have safety inspections. If there's black smoke billowing from your tailpipe or other obviously faulty equipment I think it's reasonable for the police to investigate that.
It’s definitely debatable, and is unlikely to be a primary factor in a significant number of events. It’s also hard to measure because the data is pretty bad.
As an example, your tire could blow out and cause you to hit a drunk pedestrian. It would be flagged as an alcohol related crash. Police are mostly interested in violations and liability, and you are responsible. Unless it’s a fatality, nobody will even ask if your failure to stop was related to poor brakes or bald tires.
In my opinion, the only clear stat is how many people are dead. Everything else requires domain expertise to interpret.
The UK also has much stricter training requirements prior to being granted a license, among other differences. I don't think we can pin all the differences on the yearly MOT.
I would argue it's more effective to enforce stuff like this with mandatory periodical inspections than to leave it to random police checks. There are several reasons for that - the police are already doing lot of things, so they might not care; 'normalisation of deviation' etc.
If you spend your time in the northeast and drive south semi-regularly, you notice it if you’re observant. There’s broken down cars and shredded tire debris everywhere.
Inspection is one driver of that. Salt eats cars up north which limits daily drivers to 8-10 years which is probably a bigger one. But a significantly higher number of vehicles aren’t really road worthy.
US road infrastructure is pretty bad at the best of times, highways are devoid of safety and notification systems. Hence why MASSIVE pile ups are a thing