

| Subject: | Re: Diesel conversion and SMOG |
| From: | John Bange |
| Date: | Thu, 8 Dec 2005 21:31:05 -0800 |
I wonder if they wil inspect old diesel vehicles or just new ones. > Probably. I remember when they decided to force ALL gasoline vehicles to go through yearly smog checks. Prior to that many cars beyond a certain age and most "49 state" cars were exempt from testing because there did not exist any emission standards for those vehicles at time of manufacture. I had a '78 280Z that was originally from arizona. It ran on regular gas and had no cat. It was infuriating to have to drag it in every year to be "tested" when there were no standards against which to test and therefore it got an automatic pass. I still had to pay though. The purported reasoning behind it was "collecting data", but later it was pretty obvious that they were just getting the system set up to go after "gross polluters". Nothing inherently wrong with that, other than that they've been slooooowly tightening the screws by nudging the threshold for "gross pollution" ever downward. Why they felt it was necessary to squeeze those inconsequential impoverished few who clearly couldn't afford to maintain their cars better, we'll never know; probably just typical state bureaucrat "let them eat cake" thinking, or maybe someone couldn't sleep at night thinking of all those yearly smog cert fees the state WASN'T collecting on older cars. At any rate, I'd wager that they'll be inspecting old diesel vehicles for "data collection" purposes, and then (surprise) suddenly we'll see the "gross polluter" thumbscrews come out again. Though I don't think it'll bother me when my cheapskate landlord is finally forced to fix her nasty soot-belching 70's turbo diesel Mercedes... What about all these guys who have diesel registrations and now have various > gasoline powerplants? > Heh. They'll probably have some 'splainin' to do... -- John Bange '90 Vanagon - "Geldsauger"
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