G'day
Australia has been watching what the Americans have been doing with
respect to the old car laws. Last time it was mentioned all the
motoring clubs and welfare institutions made such a fuss that it was
abandoned. Removing old cheap cars deprives the people who can't
afford more expensive ones apart from anything else.
There is still a movement, and rightly so, to get the old bombs off
the road. Here in the Australian Capital Territory we have
centralised annual inspections of cars for registrations. New cars
can skip a few years and any other car at the inspector's discretion
(they will sometimes just give a visual inspection to well maintained
cars and let them go). They don't get everything but their
resonable - I've failed on a loose bumper and excessive oil leaks but
the missed the rust holes in the floor.
In Queensland they don't have this and I've seen some bombs on the
road. What they're trying to do there instead is to fund police to do
spot checks. If the police see a car they suspect to be unroadworthy
they can pull it over, check it or make the owner get it inspected and
take it off the road.
I'd much prefer this system in the US. Have the company pay for
extra police to check for bombs on the road. The really bad ones
would head for the wreckers yard pretty quickly.
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_--_|\ -|- Gavin Walker
/ \ |
\_.--.*/ <- Canberra, gavin@csis.dit.csiro.au
v Australia Phone +61-6-2750964 Fax +61-6-2576325
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