Texas Governor Signs Bill Ending Yearly Vehicle Safety Inspections

Last week, the Texas state legislature passed a bill that would end yearly vehicle safety inspections. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear whether Governor Abbott would sign the bill into law since a number of law enforcement officials, including Travis County Constable Stacy Suits were pressuring him to veto it. But in the end, Abbott decided it was time to get rid of safety inspections.

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KXAN reports that Governor Abbott signed the bill into law on Tuesday, and it’s set to go into effect in 2025. But even though the bill gets rid of safety inspections, there are still 17 counties in the state that require yearly emissions inspections. Those counties include Harris, Fort Bend, Brazoria, Montgomery, Galveston, Williamson, Travis, Dallas, Tarrant, Denton, Collin, Rockwall, Kaufman, Ellis, Johnson, Parker, and El Paso.

Proponents of the bill claimed that getting rid of safety inspections would allow Texans to save both time and money. But since the $7.50 inspection fee has been replaced with a $7.50 “inspection program replacement fee,” it sounds like they’ll only be saving money if they hold off on doing repairs. That may help low-income Texans who need time to save up for a repair, but at the same time, the longer you put off doing something, the more expensive it will probably end up being. We also have a hard time believing that Governor Abbott actually cares about low-income Texans, but that’s a different discussion for a different day.

When you look at the number of states that require safety inspections, though, it’s not like Texas is on its own here. It now joins 37 other states that don’t require them, leaving only 12 that do. It will also be interesting to see how this plays out over the next several years. Will Texas’s road deaths increase significantly, or will they stay about the same? We can’t be certain either way, but Texas residents are about to find out.