Without mandatory car inspections, mechanics see fewer visits

The status of New Hampshire’s end to mandatory car inspections might still be murky in the courts, but in the repair bays, it seems pretty straightforward.

“Business-wise, we’ve seen a 20% drop in car counts at the shop,” said Dan Weed, owner of Weed Family Automotive in Concord. “I’ve talked to several other shops on the independent side and they’re mirroring the same thing.”

Last summer, the state legislature voted to end the requirement for auto inspections as of Jan. 31. That move has drawn legal challenges, but state officials are adamant that inspections are no longer necessary.

Car owners born in February, March and April, who last year would have been required to bring their vehicles into a shop, seem to be listening and are much less likely to get their cars checked this year. That isn’t a surprise: Both opponents and supporters of mandatory inspections predicted that people would stop getting their cars looked at by a mechanic every year if it wasn’t required.

Opponents say this is a good change. They argued that the system forced people to spend money unnecessarily and that it was kept around as a sort of padding for mechanics and car dealers. At the extreme end, the idea of mandatory inspections was branded a scam run by “stealerships.”

Weed, like other supporters of inspections, say the inspections saved drivers money in the long run.

“The repairs that we were finding on a regular basis were repairs that had gone unnoticed for a while. It’s less expensive to do a maintenance or proactive repair than to do an emergency or reactive repair,” he said. “If you delay a repair, delay it, delay it, that doesn’t make it any less expensive … and it costs more if you have to be towed.”

Weed Family Auto on Storrs Street has been around 31 years, with 4 technicians and two service providers, as well as Dan and his wife, Jodi. His experience in the industry led Weed to make a couple of predictions about second-order effects from ending inspections.

“The small shops — the one-bay, two-bay shops — a good chunk of their business comes from inspections. Some have seen almost a 50% drop. The end result as far as some of the small guys is they’re just going to close up, retire, go away,” he said.

Larger operations with multiple bays, often associated with car dealerships, will be affected differently, he said.

“I have contacts within the dealership world. I’ve talked to several dealer-manager, dealer-owners in the past few weeks considering layoffs at the entry level side, on the repair side of things,” he said. “When you’re trying to get new kids in [the industry], this is their stepping stone. It will be harder “

The legislature voted last summer to end the inspection mandate, but officials neglected to get permission from the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the federally required emissions portion of inspections. That led Gordon-Darby Holdings, the firm with the contract to operate the state’s emissions program, to sue.

A federal judge blocked the end of the mandate with a preliminary injunction, which directed the state to wait until the Environmental Protection Agency issued a waiver to end vehicle emissions testing. While the state has not brought back inspections, the judge has since declined to hold the state in contempt, ruling this week that authorities have made “diligent efforts” to comply with her order.

That doesn’t end the court case, but the state has already advised drivers that they do not need an inspection sticker.