From Asheville Citizen-Times, Dec. 19

General Assembly auditors recommended recently that North Carolina should scale back inspection requirements for Tar Heel automobile owners.

We’d say General Assembly auditors are onto something with that conclusion.

Automobile inspections in all of North Carolina’s 100 counties focus on safety, with another 48 counties also performing emissions testing. All told, it adds up to a pretty penny out of taxpayers’ pockets — $141 million.

The question on the table is what kind of bang we’re getting for that buck.

The answer is far from clear.

The state’s Program Evaluation Division says the inspections aren’t effective and should be scrapped, or at least changed to exempt cars three years old or newer.

Again, we feel that conclusion is on the right track.

There are, of course, many questions that need to be answered.

For example, statistics on traffic accidents show less than 1 percent of wrecks are caused by vehicle defects.

Those numbers make a case for ending the safety inspections; then again, there’s a chicken-and-egg factor possibly at play.

A lot can happen to a car in the 12 months between inspections, and the inspections themselves haven’t been the subject of rigorous oversight. The PED report showed the average inspection lasted five minutes, and also showed the Division of Motor Vehicles hadn’t kept up with its required audits of inspection stations.

There are some positive changes already under way regarding inspections. A new program is being phased in to hook up emissions and safety inspection stations to a state computer database. On a practical level, this will bring two noticeable changes for drivers around the state.

First, the familiar windshield sticker is going the way of the dinosaur. (The stickers will be affixed to license plates instead).

Secondly, the state will begin sending annual renewal notices that include inspection dates, a step of sort toward one-stop shopping.

The safety inspections program has been around for 42 years, but neither it nor the emissions program had been thoroughly reviewed for more than a decade.

North Carolina is rather unique in its inspection practices, being one of only 16 states that conduct both emissions and safety inspections.

There are 15 states that don’t conduct inspections at all.

At the end of the day, it’s safe to say that nearly all crashes are caused by unsafe drivers, unsafe vehicles.

And if the safety inspections are mere kabuki designed mainly to be a source of income for the state, they won’t be missed.