Mine comes from the early 1970s when I took a car over the ACT pits for the first time _ a NSW-registered Morris Minor. I had just bought it for $180. There was a lot of scratching a jabbing underneath and then a sickening crunch of metal as the blade of large screwdriver appeared between my legs.
I was young, indigent and naive. Nearby convenient Dodgy Brothers mechanics shops awaited the rejectees. It cost more to weld the rust than the car cost in the first place. Welcome to Canberra.
I was incensed then, but grateful now.
Cars are better now and the ACT Department of Urban Services is looking at changing the dreaded annual vehicle inspection. The Registrar of Motor Vehicles, Peter Tinson, is preparing a report to the ACT Government on what should be done.
Should inspections be scrapped? Would that be a Good Thing, or a misery-causing folly?
The question is a good exercise in economics, public policy, engineering, causation and even political and moral philosophy.
The ACT used to have the strictest registration testing in Australia: every car was inspected at a government station every year. Now that is down to every car over six years old every year, and minor defects can be dealt with by a garage rather than going back to another station. About 120,000 cars a year are inspected, and despite horror stories it is fairly efficient: total cost $1.6 million ($14 a car), and 85 per cent of cars have less than 20 minutes waiting time.
The justification for inspections relies on a string of causation about which there is not much research.
How many accidents are caused by bad cars, rather than bad drivers or bad external conditions (bumble bees, falling trees etc)? Do inspections reduce the number of bad cars on the roads that would otherwise be in accidents? Even if they do, does the prevention of those accidents warrant the cost of inspections?
The last question has to balance the pure economists’ view with the philosophers’. The economist tries to quantify pain and suffering as well as mangled cars and loss of earning with money. The philosopher might say it is the government’s duty to protect citizens’ well-being.
Most opinion in Australia suggests that defective cars play only a minor role in accidents, perhaps as low as 2 per cent. Assuming inspections prevented all of those accidents, the cost of inspections would still not be justified (insofar as 40 lives and 400 injuries can be quantified).
In Victoria (where inspections take place only on change of ownership), the RACV concludes that annual inspections would cost $260 million and might lower accident costs by between $30 million and $90 million. It estimated that at most between 0.6 and 1.8 per cent of crashes would have been prevented by annual inspections.
Essentially, it says that tyres and brakes are the main car-defect problems that cause accidents and these defects develop in a short space of time so inspections do not catch them.
Older cars have proportionately more accidents, but the RACV suggests this could be because the sort of people who drive them (the old, the young and economically disadvantaged) are more likely to have accidents anyway.
The RACV recommends no change other than to beef up police defect notices.
In NSW, the NRMA has a different conclusion. It questions the conventional wisdom that defects do not cause many accidents. It says police who report these things are not trained to assess causation and in fact do not do detailed causation tests for most accidents.
Given that police general training is to sniff out criminality, their biases would be towards driver error.
The NRMA says also that a single accident might have combined causes: some driver error, some car error and some environmental.
Another possibility not mentioned in the several motorists associations’ reports is that vehicle defects might contribute to the severity of injury in a crash whose primary causation was human. Better brakes, tyres, suspension and perhaps steering could have lessened the impact and thus the severity of injury.
The NRMA cites European and US research as saying inspections are cost effective. Testing at the third year and then annually could save two and half times the cost of inspections in saved accidents.
The NRMA points to manifold defects in a private-enterprise system across a large state. On average a garage authorised to do inspection gets checked once every 50 years, and if defective the penalties are paltry.
The fundamental problems are mates and crooks: mates who pass unsafe cars and crooks who suggest unnecessary repairs to safe ones. The NRMA called for more independent checking.
So we have the two largest motoring associations disagreeing.
However, Australia, like the US, is a federation and different states have different inspection regimes. If inspections were effective, you would expect them to show in the accident statistics. They do not. There is no correlation.
In six of the 11 years 1982-92, South Australia, which has no inspections, has been equal to or under the national accident figure (deaths per 100 million vehicle kilometres) and has been under the figure in NSW, an inspection state, also for six of the 11 years, and under Queensland a low-inspection state five of the 11 years.
In seven of the 11 years, NSW (an inspection state) had a higher accident rate than Queensland a non-inspection state.
Victoria a low-inspection state was under the national average in nine of the eleven years and equal in two others, and consistently under NSW a high-inspection state.
The ACT which has the toughest testing is consistently under the national accident average.
However, NSW does not test vigorously and independently and three other factors outweigh the ACT figure: better roads, higher incomes (so better cars), lower aged population.
So the best you can say from the national figures is that change-of-ownership-only inspections are a waste of time as are inspections at the local garage.
The national figures, however, point to where policy people should be looking. Victoria has had consistently lower-than-average accident rates in the past 12 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, it had an horrific toll.
The reason for the Victorian success is that it has tackled the problem on many fronts: tougher laws, greater police presence and more education. (It has done it in that order.)
The Victorian experience shows that the money is better spent on these things than blanket vehicle testing. Part of the tougher laws and greater police presence, of course, is more random checking of vehicles for safety _ at RBT and radar stations and in carparks.
This is likely to be the new ACT approach.
Moreover, the lower accident rates indicate that improved new-car design and safety standards may be reducing car defects as an accident cause.
The trouble is it may be politically difficult to sell the abandoning of annual tests because ever since they began in the US in the late 1930s, the popular myth has been that they reduce accidents significantly, and perhaps they did at first.
Now it seems the accident-prevention dollar is better spent on the driver than the car.