If you saw what I saw every day you would be encouraging stricter safety inspections.
The OBDII part can go away as far as I am concerned, but I see cars that have no business being on the road trying to get inspection sticker.... bad suspension components, rotted brake and fuel lines, you name it. You can't use salt on your roads and expect people will willingly maintain the hidden systems on the car.
No, sorry, that shit needs to go away too. The whole inspection thing is a state orchestrated boondoggle of epic proportions. There are entire states that have none or very little of that horsehit and they have very little problems. There's just a cabal of people that like the free money from the inspection racket (as well as the overpriced light bulbs they sell when someone fails for a license plate bulb or whatever).
The other problem that I have with this is- that stupid sticker not being "up to date" sort of violates due process. I can have a car on the road, with an expired
sticker, that will still easily pass inspection. The state is allowed to cast an aspersion on the condition of my vehicle without actually having to prove it, in that
moment in time. The reverse is also true where the state is giving someone a false sense of security by issuing that sticker. You can get a sticker for a car that has tires that have the legal minimum tread on it. In a month or two it will be out of compliance and "zomg DANGEROUS!!!" a lot of good that sticker did someone in terms of "keeping peoplesafe".
Also, when I was far younger, and dumber, I've literally lost count of the amount of times that I had a car on the road that was paper legal with a perfectly good inspection sticker, but I either had horrible brakes that were failing (like metal scraping on metal kind of failing, not just "oh, the pad wore down a bit, but was basically at end of life" or had bent suspension components like trailing arms, etc... for a short while until I could afford to fix those issues. Or tires that were extremely worn but still structurally sound. I just kept the car off wet roads until I could afford to replace the tires.
That magic sticker really did a GREAT job of keeping my my "bad, dangerous car" off the roads.
Also is there even an actuarial value in it? I don't see this, at least among passenger vehicles, as being a primary cause of accidents/car wrecks. Nobody ever legitimately says "I wouldn't have hit that bus full of nuns if my brakes didn't suddenly give out" It's always some form of gratuitous direct negligence by a driver that causes it, not bad equipment.
If there was an actuarial value you wouldn't need a state mandated inspection sticker because an insurance company would mandate some kind of inspection as a condition of getting insurance, or perhaps they would offer a big discount. In the states that don't have this crap, do such programs exist? I'm doubtful of that. If it meant something ins. cos would be asking for inspections at least 3 times a year.
This inspection business is mostly the product if pant shitters and some people who want a lot of free cash. It's the same kind of mind virus as the people who think there are tons of vans with FREE CANDY roaming around going to scoop up all their kids if theyre not within eyesight, because nancy grace has convinced everyone that diddlers are everywhere just waiting to jump out of the bushes and rape children at any moment....
-Mike