On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 06:00:46 -0500, micky
wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 28 Nov 2020 17:40:38 -0500,
wrote:

On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 11:06:57 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 1:45:56 PM UTC-5, Bod wrote:
On 28/11/2020 18:33, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 11/28/2020 12:47 PM, trader_4 wrote:
On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 9:53:57 AM UTC-5, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 28 Nov 2020 06:18:47 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Sat, 28 Nov 2020 01:13:08 -0500, micky wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 18:05:44 -0600, Hank Rogers

Remember when we had sealed beam headlights? Plain, cheap Glass.

And they never burned out. Though I decided to get fancy and I
replaced them once with halogen, and those did burn out.


Your memory of sealed beams is different than mine.
Well maybe I didn't drive as much as I could have.
Besides replacing a few on my own
cars, I saw many "one-eyed" cars on the road. That's a rare sight
nowadays.
But I drive less now than I did then, and I was one-eyed twice in the
last two years. Occasionally when I'm facing something reflective, a
store window, certain cars, I test my headlights but I don't know how
long they had been out. There are enough street lights here that
unless I go to the next town at night, I can't tell by how well I can
see.

Also one fog light burned out. Will the police stop you for that? I
guess, if allowed, it would make a good excuse and they like to stop
people.


Police where? AFAIK fog lights are not required in NJ, there might
be some state that
does, but I doubt it. From my experience they are close to worthless
anyway. Maybe
if you live somewhere that regularly has serious fog, they might be
useful.



At least in some states, if the car has them they must work in order to
pass inspection. Unless foggy, they would not be on anyway so the
police would not stop you.
Of the 30 or so cars I've owned, only a few had fog lights. Just three
I can think of and I never used them.

Does the US have a mandatory yearly car safety check?

It varies from state to state and IDK what the latest status is, but some states required
no inspections. Others like here in NJ used to be annual. We have state inspection
stations. They used to check most things, lights, horn, windshield wipers, cracks in glass, tire tread.
They lifted the front of the car up, shook the wheels to see if ball joints were loose.
The drove it forward slowly to a spot with a brake force pad, slammed on the brakes and
red fluid would rise in cylinders on a test jig, showing force on each wheel. Then they
added emissions testing, even running it on a dynamometer. That cost cost us a
a billion and it was screwed royally, didn't work at first, lines hours long waiting to get
inspected. That was from a federal mandate under Clinton.

Then just a few years later, the feds suddenly decided that the info from the car's
computer was sufficient, so they tore out the billion of gear they had just put in.
Surely the EPA had to know that the OBD method was available and either was or
soon would be available. That's why many of us are very skeptical of the environmentalists.

And today here in NJ that's all they check, emissions via hooking up to the OBD port on
the car. You can drive in with headlights out or pointed to blind oncoming traffic,
bad brakes, cracked winshield, loose suspension parts. None of it is checked or matters.
Just emissions. Pass and it's good for 2 years. And new cars are exempt for 5 years.
And in all my years, I can't recall reading about a single accident that was caused by
a fault on a car in NJ. Other states tested nothing and I don't think they had any worse
accident stats. So I guess all that testing was for nothing.



Florida did away with the car testing under Bob Graham, a Democrat, in
1981. It was never demonstrated that the accident rate got worse for
it. In 1991 they started emissions testing but only in a few big
cities. It never happened here. That is a computer readout these days
but originally it was a tail pipe sniff.

Yes, you remind me that the law never required emissions testing
everywhere, only in places with high measured air pollution, with the
kind of pollution caused by cars.

In Maryland this is only Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and the
suburbs of DC, Montgomery, Anne Arundel, and Prince George counties, and
surpringly to me, Frederick County. That's still less than half the
state and I think in every other state it's less, much less, or much
much less.

And I don't have to do it anymore because I'm over some age and drive
less than some amount. I do have to tell them every 2? years how
little I drive.

I changed my address to Chuck County to dodge the PG testing before I
could just get out of Maryland completely.