Smog checks becoming little more than smokescreen

A friend of mine is the proud owner of a 2002 Honda. He’s piled almost 130,000 miles on the vehicle since buying it 13 years ago. It’s far beyond any factory warranty or even an extended warranty.

So how many smog tests do you think his vehicle has failed?

If you guessed “zero,” then step right up and claim your prize.

That anecdote, as much as any, tells why an Assembly bill that proposes dialing back Nevada’s automobile smog inspection law has legs — or wheels, as the case may be. Jim Wheeler, R-Minden, chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, submitted AB146, which seeks to require emissions testing every other year instead of annually. The bill also exempts new vehicles from smog checks for four years, rather than the current two years.

Of course, the businesses that depend on this government mandate are up in arms. The Review-Journal’s Richard Velotta reported that at a hearing last month in Carson City, several representatives of the emissions testing industry and county air quality regulators testified against the bill. Their main complaint: such a law would lead to a major reduction in business at smog testing stations, perhaps even forcing some sites to close.

If that’s the case, then they really should be complaining — about the law of unintended consequences. For decades, environmentalists, empire-building government agencies, and bureaucrats and elected officials of all stripes have backed laws and regulations that force automakers to build ever-more-efficient vehicles that pollute less and less.

Automakers complied, and guess what? The intervention worked as intended. Newer-model vehicles run exceptionally clean and pass smog inspections at an overwhelming rate. In Nevada, where smog tests are required only in Clark and Washoe counties, 1,267,187 passenger vehicles were inspected in 2013, according to Department of Motor Vehicles statistics. Only 56,162 failed — just 4.4 percent. And that includes vehicles made as far back as 1968.

To put the numbers in a clearer perspective, take the average age of a car on the road today — 11.4 years, according to a 2014 report by Forbes.com — and apply it to Nevada’s numbers. In 2013, vehicles manufactured from 2003 to 2013 accounted for 763,143 of the state’s inspections, or 60.2 percent of passenger vehicles. Just 14,913 of those cars failed inspection — a mere 1.95 percent.

So a regulation has actually worked the way those who imposed it intended (unless of course, they enacted it solely to create a new bureaucracy), and now they’re complaining about scaling back an unnecessary annual inconvenience — and expense — for car owners in Nevada. You’d think they’d be delighted that smoke isn’t billowing from tailpipes, and that they’d act on that delight by loosening the reins on taxpayers.

But then you’d forget what government is especially good at: imposing burdensome regulations and costs on its citizens and never recoiling from those policies, even in the face of mounds of evidence suggesting it should. Ethanol and Obamacare, anyone?

The current smog policy has been in place for at least two decades, a span in which cars have become far more efficient and environmentally friendly. Wheeler’s bill is on the right track, but based on the statistics, he should push it even further. The 2013 smog check data show you have to go back to 2008 to reach the first vehicle year with a failure rate of more than 1 percent. So let that be the new standard: five years from the in-service date before a vehicle requires a smog check, then an inspection every other year thereafter.

Would such reforms hurt the emissions testing business? Absolutely. But why should government-created businesses be able to ignore reality in a way that other industries never could?

Further, why should businesses propped up by the bureaucracy be immune from the laws of supply and demand? The state’s own statistics prove there should no longer be a huge demand for smog testing. The supply of outfits offering that service should therefore shrink accordingly. And my friend should be able to drive that Honda into the ground, as long as it passes that test — every two years.

Patrick Everson is an editorial writer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Follow him on Twitter: @PatrickCEverson.