N.J. vehicle inspectors reach upgrade deadline

For private auto shops that want to continue providing New Jersey state vehicle inspections, it's time to put up or shut down.

Shop owners must pay for new emissions-testing equipment, costing about $8,000, by today as the Motor Vehicle Commission prepares to upgrade its inspection services. Businesses that haven't paid will not be allowed to perform inspections, effective immediately.

About 1,400 gas stations and repair shops in New Jersey provide about 600,000 inspections annually, said Mike Horan, a commission spokesman. There are also 30 state-run inspection stations that serve about 2.3 million cars a year, he said.

John Naz, owner of Naz Auto in Moorestown, was around in 1999 when the state required private inspectors to purchase $50,000 dynamometers, essentially treadmills for cars that are used to administer emissions tests. The dynamometer cannot properly diagnose newer vehicles, which have different technology, Horan said.

Replacing the obsolete dynamometer is significantly cheaper than the last upgrade, but Naz is angry about the administration of the requirement, which he said was planned without adequate input from private inspectors.

"They don't look out for the little guy at all," Naz said. "It's not the price of the equipment, it's the way they're implementing it."

Private shops were told that they would have to pay before July 1 in order to continue inspections. However, the new emissions-testing equipment won't be authorized for use until late November, Horan said.

Shop owners say that shelling out thousands months before the equipment was needed has strained their finances in a tough economic period. After hearing owners' complaints at meetings last month, the manufacturer offered a financing option.

The cost of the upgrade was announced in August, and provided ample time for inspectors to prepare, Horan said. He said that a lot of shop owners had likely procrastinated.

But Suzanne Applegate, owner of Highway Tire Distributors in Mount Holly, said the first she and several of her South Jersey competitors heard of the expense and paperwork involved was in early May.

"I think a lot of people up north might have had the first wave of it," she said.

As of last week, fewer than 600 private locations had paid for the equipment. The 1999 upgrade cut the number of inspection locations from 3,750 to 1,500.

Naz and Applegate both say they have paid for the equipment. Though the switch could bump out firms that don't think the upgrade is worth it at this time, Applegate feared that a new crop of shops - ones that didn't have to pay $50,000 for a dynamometer - might jump into the inspection business.

"A lot more people are going to get into the market now because the cost has come down quite a bit," she said.