I bought my car 4 ½ years ago in September with a brand new West Virginia inspection sticker on the windshield. The following fall, my car passed inspection with no problem, but I remember standing in the parking lot, holding my breath because I had never had a car pass inspection before. Never before had any of my vehicles passed the state inspection on the first try in 20 plus years of owning a car.
I’ve always had to buy used cars and, usually, they were very used. Car purchases are expensive when you’re poor. First, there’s the price of the car. Savings and poverty typically don’t go hand in hand. If you’ve ever found yourself making or agreeing with comments about SNAP recipients and their new cars, let me explain how this works.
The down payments are large, which is why you see a lot of temporary tags around tax time. And the monthly payments are usually quite high because of the risk of financing someone with little to zero or bad credit. But here’s the real rub: the finance companies typically only want to finance newer cars, so, at least in my case, I drove off the lot with a car that was newer than I ever imagined. I can pretty much guarantee that no one is riding on easy street if they’re receiving SNAP and driving a newer vehicle because those payments aren’t cheap.
You know, poor people pay the highest interest rates on loans. I learned the other day that your credit score can affect the cost of your insurance. And insurance! I have never had less than a $500 deductible and have sold vehicles because I couldn’t come up with it.
So anyway, back to that inspection sticker…. After the first year of owning my vehicle, there hasn’t been a time that my car passed inspection without work. In the past three years, my inspection has moved from September to August, eleven months. How did I get the inspection date moved? Well, by driving dirty with popped stickers. I’ve only been pulled over once for a dead sticker and that was last year. I told him that I was waiting on my tax refund so I could get new tires. He gave me a short lecture and let me go with a verbal warning.
This year, the Coronavirus saved me because inspections were waived for a few months. Last summer, while parked in front of my house, a truck threw a rock from the highway and cracked my windshield. The winter made the crack even worse, and, by the time April rolled around and my inspection expired, the crack went from one side to the other. A windshield didn’t cost $500 so my insurance wouldn’t cover it, leaving me to wonder when I would be able to repair my windshield. It has taken me until now to be able to afford the work necessary for the car to pass inspection; four months after the expiration date.
A windshield repair ran me $400. A new sway bar ran up a $370 bill the next week, and yesterday I dropped $144 on a new exhaust piece. Nearly one thousand dollars for repairs to get an inspection sticker. Oh, and the sticker? Yeah, it cost $14 with tax and all. And for what? I realize the idea we’re fed is that it’s to keep us safe, but the fact is that inspection stickers, in my opinion, are just one more policy that hurts the poor by design.
If I could have afforded routine vehicle maintenance, the sticker wouldn’t have been a big deal, but the fact of the matter is that I can’t always afford maintenance on my car. And when it comes to choosing between groceries and utilities or an inspection sticker? Well, the inspection sticker is pushed aside.
One other way this system punishes the poor is that most West Virginians drive older vehicles that require more repairs to pass annual inspections. We drive cars that are older than the national average. The argument is that the number of fatalities is lowered with safer vehicles, but the cost of the stickers doesn’t really generate enough revenue to offset any expenses, so what’s the point? I know people whose cars fail inspection due to rust spots on the body because they’re bigger than a quarter. It’s policies like this that force people to take risks that, if caught, will be even more costly. And who needs to add a lack of transportation to an already long list of obstacles to escaping poverty?
Eliminating vehicle inspections, like our neighboring states have, would be a step in the right direction for ending legislation that hurts those already struggling to survive. Seems like an easy legislative ask to me.
Onward,
Amy Jo
