At a meeting on December 22, the State Duma adopted in the third reading a law on the abolition of compulsory technical inspection for cars and motorcycles that are used by individuals for personal purposes. Car owners retain the right to undergo a technical inspection at their own request, and an inspection will also be required for vehicles over 4 years old when registering, changing the owner or changing the design. Inspection remains mandatory for commercial vehicles such as buses, trucks and taxis.
According to the experts interviewed by Vedomosti, the vehicle inspection market, which was previously “shadow”, will force the entire logistics-related business to look for new ways to obtain diagnostic cards.
Due to the decrease in the number of inspection points in Russia, the question arises of where commercial vehicles will undergo technical inspection; in small towns, market participants may not stay at all, says Anton Shaparin, vice president of the National Automobile Union. In car dealerships, “aged cars” that were handed over under the trade-in program can hang, the expert believes: before, for registration, a diagnostic card was not needed, but only an OSAGO policy was needed. Now the rules have become stricter, and the number of maintenance points has decreased.
The number of companies providing technical inspection services began to decline from the summer of 2021, follows from the data of the National Automobile Union. According to the union, 5,533 points were registered in Russia as of May 20, 5,019 remained as of June 1.
According to the Russian Union of Auto Insurers (RSA) for October 2021, only 415 organizations applied for accreditation for this type of activity, which is about 8%, and only 53 maintenance operators received accreditation. By December, Sergey Efremov, Deputy Executive Director of RSA, told Vedomosti, 700 maintenance operators had been accredited.
Shaparin notes that due to the decrease in the number of players in the market, large logistics companies may have to consider setting up their own technical inspection units. “In many regional cities, there are no inspection points at all,” Shaparin believes.
He also predicts an increase in the number of accidents involving faulty vehicles. As Rossiiskaya Gazeta wrote in February 2021, at the end of 2020, 7658 accidents involving faulty vehicles were recorded in Russia, an increase compared to 2019 by 13.7%. According to Shaparin, with an increase in the number of faulty cars on the roads, the number of such accidents may increase by 8% per year.
The RSA believes that it is premature to talk about an increase in accidents due to the abolition of mandatory technical inspection, since this decision does not cancel state control over traffic safety: traffic police officers can stop a technically faulty vehicle and check it on the spot or at special stationary points.
The vehicle inspection market “has always been shady,” including when it was under state control, and most likely it will remain so, says Aleksey Shamarin, head of the car publication Carzclub.ru. In his opinion, the risks for the business when the technical inspection is canceled are minimal: “Diagnostic cards will be made by organizations affiliated with large companies.”
The bill on the abolition of mandatory maintenance was submitted to the State Duma on September 14 by the first vice-speaker of the Federation Council Andrei Turchak, Senator Andrei Kutepov, Sergei Neverov, who at that time held the post of leader of the United Russia faction, and chairman of the Duma committee on transport Yevgeny Moskvichev. According to the authors of the bill, the passage of the technical inspection has become a “rent” for the purchase of an insurance policy and has nothing to do with safety.
The explanatory note to the bill states that the probability of participation in an accident of vehicles with malfunctions that have OSAGO policies and a diagnostic card is 1.1% for cars and 0.7% for motorcycles. According to the Chairman of the State Duma Viacheslav Volodin, the adoption of the law “will make life easier” for many car owners – technical inspection will no longer be mandatory for about 50 million vehicles.
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