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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

ryandrake's point was probably that his car is cleaner than necessary, but failing because of stupid, arbitrary rules imposed by CARB for no reason other than bureaucratic intransigence.

It's similar to the feeling I got when I waited in line for an hour to have my Miata smog-checked at a busy urban test station, and then choked on diesel exhaust from a dump truck when I made the mistake of driving away with the top down. CARB is the poster child for "Doing something just to say we're doing something."

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Bureaucratic intransigence is a really upbeat way of putting it. How about corruption through regulatory capture? Big auto needs to sell their over-priced parts. Why let people buy a $150 after-market part, when you can just call up CARB and have them make people buy equivalent $1,100 factory or OEM parts?

Wow, judging by the down-votes, people don't seem to realize how expensive CARB deliberately makes it to own an older car, regardless of how clean its emissions are.

EDIT: To further demonstrate that it's all about money and not about smog, you can get a "Repair Cost Waiver"[1] if you've spent at least $650 (on CA-approved parts, of course), and they'll approve your polluting car, no problem. All they really want is that $650 in the pockets of their car industry buddies and $XYZ worth of repeated tests in the pockets of the test stations.

1: http://www.bar.ca.gov/Consumer/Referee/Referee_Centers.html

> Wow, judging by the down-votes, people don't seem to realize how expensive CARB deliberately makes it to own an older car, regardless of how clean its emissions are.

I upvoted you even though I disagree with you for what its worth.

You're an edge case. Most people with older cars no longer maintain their emissions controls. The older the car, the more likely it is that its polluting. Is it fair? Not at all. You're just swept up in the process.

Cars built since MY 1996 are self-diagnosing for most emissions problems. Mandating factory-original parts simply means the auto manufacturers won a major political battle, not that anything effective is being done.

Many of those self-diagnosing features can be defeated by trivial circuits. A 555 timer for a downstream O2 sensor, a 4N4001 diode and a couple resistors for an EGR vacuum sensor hack, and several others.

I have had cars in the past that OBD2 reported as operating correctly, that easily passed smog/inspections, that probably weren't operating as the EPA intended.

But how many people with older cars have the initiative and the the capability to do that. It's a small fraction of a small fraction of a small fraction of vehicle owners.

Chasing a problem like that around is a waste of everyon'e time and money. Environmental regulatory agencies really need to do a better job considering the 90/10 or 80/20 rule (the last 20% of whatever you're optimizing will consume 80% of the resource).

They should still allow people to request testing of actual emissions, upon request.

At what expense/frequency, though? If it's just to cover the ocassional (unmodified) car that can't be made to report as "Ready and OK" per OBD2, it's just easier to use the existing repair exemptions process. (Spend a certain amount on repairs and get another cycle of inspection passage.)

If it's to cover modified cars, those are a trickier situation. It's easy for some to game the system so that it "passes" on the magic day and then fails the other 364 or 729 days in the cycle when it's actually being driven.

In either case, it seems like the expense of operating and staffing gas sensing stations, rolling road dynos, etc. Probably better to just turn a blind eye to that case as well.

Should we fault CARB though? They require more stringent emissions regulations due to California's geography, and both the federal government and automakers are rarely amiable to their needs.

With cars going electric, its a bit of a moot point, except for the part where pressure needs to be applied on heavy trucks now (hopefully pushing them to natural gas from diesel until energy storage catches up).

I'm still not being clear, I'm afraid. It's not a question of how stringent the emissions specifications are. The problem is CARB's reliance on equipment checks rather than tailpipe emissions checks. ryandrake's car might well be cleaner than a perfectly-stock vehicle, but if each and every component doesn't have a CARB certification number stamped on it, it's illegal.

You could argue that equipment checks are in place to prevent the very situation described in this article, where people might install shady aftermarket hardware to game emissions tests, but as we've seen, the aftermarket is not where the problem actually lies.

I'm all for keeping the air clean, but that's obviously not the motivation behind CARB's policy of failing cars with clean-blowing after-market parts.

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