MOTORING: Mandatory car inspections a drive in wrong direction

Plans to make every vehicle in Kenya subject to inspection are now well advanced. The system is likely to have both  government and private sector inspection centres.

There will have to be hundreds of them, because universal inspection once every two years will require a checking rate of 3,000 vehicles…per working day. 

It will need billions of shillings of investment in premises and equipment (including test driving areas) because existing service repair facilities will be denied registration as centres.  It will need  about 10,000 mechanics unusually well qualified in diagnostics – all doing absolutely nothing that is not already being done, or could and should be done,  at every workshop visit.

The fee for each inspection will average Sh3,000 (a total of Sh9 million per day). Added to the temporary loss-of-use cost, and the driver-time cost, and the fuel/mileage cost of getting to and from the nearest centre, will impose an overall bill of at least Sh20 million (per day!) on an exercise that is wholly non-productive.

LOGIC LINK MISSING

There seems to be a logic link missing.  The objective should never be to ensure every vehicle is inspected.  It should always be to ensure that every vehicle is roadworthy.   The two should not be confused.

Even if inspection is expertly and diligently conducted, it can assure no more than the “probable” roadworthiness of a vehicle, and only as it leaves the inspection centre.   From that instant it is incurring wear and tear and potential damage and defect on every mile and minute it is used.

Between inspections,  a private car will travel a distance equal to driving completely around the world, hit perhaps 40,000 unmarked speed bumps, an equal number of potholes, very much higher numbers of gear changes and brake pressings, many millions of flexings of the suspension, frame and bodywork and shocks and stress on the steering system.  Its wheels and tyres and shafts and bearings will rotate eight million times, and the engine will complete 160 million revolutions while combusting and exhausting 60 tonnes of air:fuel (and dirt) mixture.

Whether a vehicle survives all that without any harm, or dramatically deteriorates on the first mile in the first minute, has absolutely nothing to do with statutory inspection, which clearly will not, cannot, deliver any meaningful assurance of roadworthiness.

To avoid and remedy vehicle defect demands awareness and knowledge, more skilled driving, smoother roads, decent traffic flows, a level of constant “inspection” by the owner/driver every day, and purposeful physical check of all elements by proficient technicians at every regular visit to a workshop.

It is the diligence and competence of those elements that will make and keep vehicles more roadworthy.  So without the tiniest flicker of a shadow of doubt, it is those factors and practises to which policy should give priority attention and  investment.

A budget of Sh20 million per day would be wonderful if it was spent on public education, improved driver tuition, meaningful testing,  and on training and monitoring of workshop competence.  And there are plenty of other enabling ideas (more of that next week).

Two-yearly vehicle inspections are not a magic bullet.  Nor are they just low on the remedies menu. Here, now, they are a charade.

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