The Texas Department of Public Safety announced Monday that an outage affecting the vehicle inspection system was resolved after nearly a week.
In a press release, Texas DPS stated the outage began on August 23.
“This issue does not allow stations in safety-only counties to conduct proper inspections. At this time, emission inspections are not impacted by this outage. Station license renewal applications are also unavailable,” the agency said.
Safety-only counties are those that do not require emission tests for vehicles and only require safety inspections. There are 17 counties across Texas that require both safety inspections and emissions tests, according to Texas Public Radio, one of which is Dallas County.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We will post updates when the issue is resolved,” the department said.
After five days of dealing with the outage, DPS announced in a Facebook post on Monday afternoon that the issue had been resolved.
“DPS personnel was able to replace the damaged hardware over the weekend and finalize testing overnight on Sunday in order to allow inspections to resume on Monday morning,” the post said.
“We thank everyone for their patience and apologize for the disruption and the inconvenience this outage has caused.”
The outage comes following the passing of House Bill 3297, which would effectively eliminate annual safety inspections for noncommercial vehicles in Texas.
The bill would require all drivers to either pay a $7.50 fee for the registration renewal of a car or a $16.75 fee for the registration of a new vehicle, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Although the bill would eliminate the need for safety inspections, emission tests would still be required in some counties, according to local statutes.
Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall, and Tarrant counties are among those in DFW that require emission tests, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill in June after it was passed in both the Texas House and Senate. The law is set to go into effect as of January 1, 2025, according to the Tyler Morning Telegraph.
