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."

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

Used to be.

Nevermind the fact that California has no safety inspection, unlike many Eastern states in particular. It's fairly silly to call CA the "gestapo" although they are more aggressive about emissions than anyone else, as you mentioned.

I am a driving and motorcyclist enthusiast, and have modified cars and regularly participate in track days. Somehow I've never had a problem with CA emissions, nor have most of my like-minded friends. It's just not that bad, and it does a lot of good.

I suppose one could say that being more concerned with the more directly harmful and smog forming emissions(NOx and PM) over CO2 would constitute 'bias' against diesels. But, conversely, there's a rather compelling argument that the more lax European diesel regulations spurred diesel adoption and protect their domestic manufacturers.

https://www3.nd.edu/~jthurk/Papers/MMT.pdf

In the case of Volkswagen, the TSi engines are a much better buy than the TDi engines. Better power delivery, clean running and nearly as good fuel economy.