Texas lawmakers have approved a bill to eliminate annual safety inspections by 2025, and are now awaiting the final approval of Governor Greg Abbott before the bill is formally encoded into law.
The bill that was passed by the Senate is a compromise of an earlier version that passed the House in May, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The earlier iteration of the bill would have done away with safety inspections by September 2023. However, the Senate pushed that date back to January 2025.
Proponents of the bill say that annual inspections do little to improve road safety, burden rural Texans who live farther from a mechanic, and reward fraud. They also point to the fact that the majority of states do not require safety inspections.
“Vehicle inspections are a costly and time-consuming process that provide little benefit to public safety,” Rep. Mayes Middleton, a Republican Senate member, told legislators earlier this month.
Read: Millions Of Texas Cars Suspected Of Fraudulently Passing Vehicle Inspections
Meanwhile, opponents of the bill argue that eliminating safety inspections could make roads less safe at a time when they are busier than ever. In an op-ed, The Dallas Morning News‘ editorial board described ending inspections as “a bad idea” and urged Governor Abbott to veto the bill.
“The issue should be less about free-choice, personal responsibility and modest inconvenience and more about collective responsibility to make shared roads safer, or at least not more dangerous,” it wrote.
It cited a study by the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Transportation Research, which found that the state’s inspections system continues to find safety faults, and recommended expanding the list of items that should be checked, not cutting it. The paper also noted that fatalities and injuries are much worse in vehicles with safety defects than those without.
The state fee that was collected during safety inspections will continue to be imposed on drivers if the bill is signed into law. The levy will simply be converted into new charges that owners pay to register their vehicles.
Separately, Texas recently signed a bill into law to add a $200 annual registration fee for electric vehicles. That measure is designed to replace the revenue lost by the vehicles that are not required to contribute to the state’s road budget through its gas tax. Opponents of that bill argued that the $200 annual fee was higher for electric vehicles than the average driver of an internal combustion vehicle pays in gas taxes.
