You technically can't drive a car off a lot without proving you have insurance coverage (at least in every state I've lived in), and, when you re-register your car every year, you'll again need to prove insurance coverage; failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over. So in that sense, the system coheres.
But insurance coverage can fluctuate over the course of a year, because unlike with health insurance, there's no annual enrollment period; people switch insurers, or miss bills, or sign up ruthlessly for a month of insurance to get past the state bureaucracy and then just never pay again.
There's the SR-22 system, which is a court order to maintain insurance at minimum levels, which you get for getting repeatedly pulled over without insurance (or, perhaps, for getting pulled over without proof of insurance and then not proving you did get coverage afterwards). But that's not a fix, because you can only enforce it at police traffic stops.
> failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over. So in that sense, the system coheres.
anecdata, but in my town of 60k people, any one drive I do I couldn't even count on my hands the number of expired temp tags (I've seen over a year old), and expired registration.
It really _feels_ like people don't get pulled over for that anymore.
>failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over
My car is insured and registered, but it has been the better part of ten years since I actually bothered to put a new sticker on the plate. Maybe there are places where cops try to more actively police expired plates, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a thing around here.
My state (WA) doesn't check for insurance at registration, as far as I know. I renew in December so it's pretty recent and I can't remember ever doing that. Also, realpolitik: my city's police simply don't do traffic enforcement since 2020 (Seattle). You could probably go a long time with expired registration here as long as you didn't leave city limits.
But insurance coverage can fluctuate over the course of a year, because unlike with health insurance, there's no annual enrollment period; people switch insurers, or miss bills, or sign up ruthlessly for a month of insurance to get past the state bureaucracy and then just never pay again.
There's the SR-22 system, which is a court order to maintain insurance at minimum levels, which you get for getting repeatedly pulled over without insurance (or, perhaps, for getting pulled over without proof of insurance and then not proving you did get coverage afterwards). But that's not a fix, because you can only enforce it at police traffic stops.