These inspections are nothing but pointless revenue generation for the state, checking for the check engine light and inspecting 1 wheel at most usually. Lots of states don't even have them.

In Germany they are very serious about vehicle inspections, and insurance requirements.

Didn't the big German auto manufacturers literally develop the hacks to bypass diesel emissions inspections? I'm not sure I'd hold anyone up in a pedestal on this score...

Those cars still passed the inspection. Which means they were physically sound. A battery isn't going to shift into an alternate mode where it becomes a spontaneous fire hazard.

Those have nothing to do with each other: Germany indeed has a company level corruption problem (especially in combination with the conservative party), but pretty low corruption at the citizen level, i.e. where vehicle inspections happen.

They got caught.

Not by any German regulator or agency.

That sounds more like an argument for effective inspections being universally required more than anything else? Apologies if I've misinterpreted.

We get by fine without rigorous inspections, and they amount to a regressive tax like a lot of other fees related to keeping a car.

Death by burning from an exploding battery from an uninspected, poorly-mainteained car in the garage of your shared low-rent apartment building is also a regressive tax.

I'll take the inspections.

It's not like states without inspections have an endemic of exploding cars as it is. I don't think the justification for inspections is really there.

Fuel-based cars tend to burn after an extreme adverse event, usually a collision.

Battery fires are more frequently spontaneous, or occur during charging.

How many barbequed children do you find an acceptable number?

Battery fires usually happen after collisions too. Fires while charging are rare but they grab headlines because they're novel.

I think trying to use inspections to solve that is a case of barking up a really stupid tree. In the case of EV charging fires there's not really much a mechanic can inspect that some electronics cobbled onto the pack couldn't. In the case of battery pack damage an annual inspection isn't going to do much good since most of those cases will cause problems before that or not at all.

"Parked Teslas Keep Catching on Fire Randomly, And There's No Recall In Sight"

https://www.thedrive.com/news/28420/parked-teslas-keep-catch...

Article list 9 cases. None involved accidents. Several were during charging, one during transport (on a flatbed truck).

All are of

In Ireland, roughly half of the vehicles going for the NCT fail on the first try, and ultimately about 5% don’t pass at all after retries.

Of that, I’d say half of the initial failures are simple things that don’t require a mechanic, (dead bulbs, bad/low tires) and the rest require a me hanic to do something.

My state has inspections, but does not charge for them.