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Comment by kw71 | Hacker News Reader

> It seems Tesla is deliberately ignoring or trying to squash the aftermarket/custom-car culture

This culture ("F your emissions controls," "I the lay blue collar know better than the committes of degreed engineers who designed the thing") has never cared about safety, nor has the aftermarket ("fitness for purpose, engineering, warranty... to hell with all that, the only requirement for our product is that some idiot should buy it")

Improperly repaired and modified cars are a detriment to the safety of others on the road, but wishing the problem away like Tesla is doing is not going to help anything, they need to publish and make accessible the documentation like the real car makers do.

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>Improperly repaired and modified cars are a detriment to the safety of others on the road

Mechanical failure is a fart in a hurricane compared to human factors (distraction, alcohol, run of the mill stupidity) when it comes to dangerous things on the road. Regulating mechanical condition is exponentially less effective once you start caring about more than the most basic things (e.g. heavy trucks with bald tires). That's why a handful of states have created then scrapped vehicle inspection programs. I get that it bothers people but mechanical failure is a tiny edge case compared to everything else. Why bother, there's other better things to spend our resources regulating if road safety is the goal. If mechanical condition mattered more than trivially this would be reflected in insurance rated between states with/without regulation covering this (inspection programs).

In my experience shitboxes with mufflers falling off and rust holes are more likely to damage community image than anything else.

In the US, yea, inspections aren't universal, but the only inspection program I know of that has been scrapped was Florida's. I think there are more operating inspection regimes than defunct ones, even if you can cheat some of them. This also seems to be an anomaly among developed countries.

Rust that's more than superficial can lead to structural failure, and improper crash repairs can cause this. These are definitely situations that leave the vehicle in a lesser state of crashworthiness.

A compromised exhaust frequently leads to more exhaust entering the cabin.

This gets into the roots of my socialist beliefs as caring for our injured comrades brings us all down. There are always better things to send effort and resources to than dealing with the loss of productivity, the costs to deal with whatever damage, and misery of loved ones.

Indiana used to have safety inspections, scrapped several decades ago.

Part of the reason is probably that cars (even in rust prone areas) don't rust nearly as quickly as they used to, and everything else on the vehicle, e.g. tires, brakes, suspension are much better and (in the case of suspension components at least) require much less regular maintenance. There's just no low-hanging fruit any more. GP is right, resources are better spent elsewhere.

California had an inspections program and they got rid of it.

When did California have a safety inspection program? I only know of the emissions inspection program, which still exists, but for most vehicles is simply does OBD-II say everything is fine, and is it not making visible smoke.

I think I am wrong,

https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

Says vehicle inspections were considered and repeatedly rejected.

Utah recently got rid of safety inspections.

"This gets into the roots of my socialist beliefs"

Regulation is not socialism. And being in favor of regulation or socialism shouldn't mean that you are against intelligent regulations that take into account costs and benefits.

It's common for favoring socialism and being in favor of intelligent regulation to be mutually exclusive.

I don't believe there is anybody who believes the government does useful things and wants it to be stupid.

> Improperly repaired and modified cars are a detriment to the safety of others on the road

I'll take streets full of gearheads tinkering with their cars over soccer moms ignoring grinding brakes until the rotor disc completely separates from the hat/hub any day.

It frustrates me too that for every tuner that gets too excited with their camber there are a hundred shitboxes with bald tires and janky emission systems that stopped being effective sometime in the Clinton administration, yet for some reason the tuners are the ones commonly vilified.

I'm excited about EVs improving this situation.

With ICEs it's somewhat necessary to become more obnoxious in pursuit of greater performance. Faster ICE-powered cars tend to be noisier and stinkier, it's somewhat inherent.

Gearheads in the EV-era will be a lot less visible. You won't know who has upgraded their batteries, controllers, and motors. I wish Tesla would take a different stance on this and instead embrace and support the grassroots motorsports scene. GM Performance has already announced an EV crate motor, so it looks like GM might be taking the lead here.

You have a point.

The gearheads just have their cars sitting there in non-running condition while they tinker. The soccer moms are driving around with noisy distractions in the back seat.

(Only halfway joking. I have 4 kids.)

It's much worse than you think. Some states don't require regular safety inspections. I've seen some scary stuff on the road in those states.

If those states were measurably less safe wouldn't that be reflected in insurance premiums? Mechanical failure is inconsequential compared to boring old human factors (distractions, alcohol, bad decisions) when it comes to dangers on the road.

The problem is that there are confounding factors.

States with regular inspections tend to have more expensive cars, higher wealth, higher traffic density and so on. Those factors are going to drive insurance rates up as well.

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