Will Vermont Inspections Put More Rust to Rest?

By Alex Hanson

Valley News Staff Writer

Published: 02-13-2017 4:56 PM

A few years ago, I bought an old car.

Even though I’ve bought a few old cars over the past several years and ought to have known better, the old car in this case had some rust. Actually, a lot of rust.

But since I hadn’t paid much money for it, and because no one in his right mind would buy it from me, I set about making it roadworthy. The rust was terminal, but with some judicious repair, the car had some life left in it.

What I had on my hands was a perfect winter beater.

For the uninitiated, that’s not a car that beats winter, but a car that’s ideal for knocking around the frost-heaved, salt-covered roads, either because that’s what its driver can afford or to give a nicer car the winter off. A beater, whether it’s for winter or all year-round, is a car that’s drawing near its expiration date.

My mechanic, who has been known to run a beater himself, did a little welding. I replaced a couple of shocks, and later on the brakes, the radiator and the clutch. A car that could have been a lemon got me through three winters, hauled trash to the dump and firewood to my front yard. I’m calling it lemonade.

But with Vermont’s new motor vehicle inspection regime due to begin in about a month, I wonder whether winter beaters will soon go the way of the manual transmission and the roadie beer, passing into automotive folklore.

In an effort to understand what the new inspection system means, I listened to a very thorough interview with Robert Ide, the state’s commissioner of motor vehicles, on VPR’s Vermont Edition. What I heard confirmed my fears. The new system seems likely to affect people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, as well as middle income people like me who want to keep their old cars on the road.

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Under the Automated Vehicle Inspection Program, each certified inspection station will have to pay $1,600 for a tablet computer that carries the inspection software. The tablet will enable mechanics to take photographs of a car’s issues and transmit them to a central database. This will allow the state to gather data on motor vehicle inspections, Ide told VPR.

It will also cut down on “sticker shopping.” We all know what that is: The names of lenient inspection stations are passed around among people who can’t afford a major repair bill.

“What we’re going to be able to analyze,” Ide said, “is if in fact there is a weakness in our program where a station is not performing to the standards of their neighbors and to our expectations.” Though Ide also claimed that the system would show whether stations are overselling customers on repairs.

The safety inspection itself won’t change. Brakes, suspension, steering, tires, lights, horn and other safety equipment will be checked just as they are now, as will emissions on cars from 1996 and newer. But the inspection will likely cost more. The contract with the vendor that provides the automated system requires a new fee of $2.21 per inspection, and most inspection stations will likely pass on the cost of the tablet computer to customers in the form of a higher inspection fee. The state will continue to collect $6 per inspection, which is part of the state’s transportation funding.

When VPR host Jane Lindholm opened the show up for comments, many of the calls were about how the inspections would affect working people. “I think Vermont has sort of lost its mind,” said one caller from northern Vermont.

The state is also likely to lose a substantial chunk of its inspection stations. Ide noted an attrition rate of around 50 percent in other states that have adopted the automated system. Vermont is on track to retain 70 percent of its inspection stations, though Ide told VPR that that percentage is likely to decline somewhat. I suspect it will be smaller, more marginal businesses, the kind of neighborhood places that might let a patron fix a rust hole with some sheet metal and pop rivets, that will balk at the $1,600 cost of the tablet.

Vermont has inspected motor vehicles since 1935, and for a good reason. Ide noted that his first responsibility is to protect innocent motorists and passengers from uninspected vehicles. He has a point. A mechanic in central Vermont pleaded guilty last June to a charge of reckless endangerment. The state had charged him with manslaughter after a 2014 car accident killed an 82-year-old woman. The mechanic had put a sticker on the car despite the customer’s reluctance to replace rusty brake lines. The woman was a passenger in the car when the brake lines failed, leading to an accident. The state Attorney General’s Office said it was the first criminal prosecution in Vermont stemming from a motor vehicle inspection.

To me, that story is less one of negligence on the part of the mechanic, than one about the difficult choices faced by people whose resources are stretched impossibly thin.

I grew up driving older cars. Twice now I’ve experienced that awful feeling of pushing the brake pedal to the floor and having nothing happen, thanks to a broken brake line. Both times — the first 20-plus years ago, the second just last fall — I was able to use the handbrake and the manual transmission to slow down and stop. Driving an old car is a daily exercise in understanding the fallibility of our mechanized world. Accordingly, I drive slowly.

If the winter beaters all go to the scrapyard — the old, cube-like Volvo sedans, all-wheel-drive Toyota wagons, the diesel Mercedes-Benzes, the crusty trucks — maybe we’ll be safer on the roads. But it’s fair to ask what we’ll lose. Rural New England has always reveled in its ability to make do, to get by when times are tough. For some people, times are always tough, and to make it more expensive to keep a car on the road seems unfair to me, a victory of Montpelier’s technocrats over the state’s scrappy, improvisational character, its history of living close to the ground.

My winter beater of a few years ago is now mostly out of commission. I’m driving it only as far as the dump and the town sand pile. This spring I’ll drop the insurance and start stripping it for parts.

But more recently, I found another old car. It’s even older and cheaper (I tell people I paid in the mid-three figures), but it has no major rust. Its paint is peeling, it’s not pretty, but I fixed the brakes and the shocks, tuned it up and threw on some snow tires I found in the classifieds. It should be good to go for a few winters, as long as I can get a sticker.

You can hear VPR’s full interview with DMV Commissioner Robert Ide at http://digital.vpr.net/term/vehicle-inspections#stream/0

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

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