It ticks me off that the smog police and the tree hugger's are always trying to get our oldies off the road.
The stupid thing is #1 we're saving all of these cars from becoming landfill and
#2 because we work to make sure our babies are running right, our cars pollute far less than some guys 95 honda that he doesn't give a crap about.
Ass backwards.
Yes it is.
There's several things wrong with the emissions laws, no matter where it is. A couple are the things you addressed. Hot rodders, restorers - even just plain old enthusiasts who prefer to use an older car for daily driving - are the original recyclers.
We've done more for the environment and the economy than anything that Solyndra did, without billions of taxpayers dollars to back us. Because we like things clean and clean running we keep up on our routine maintenance, take care of those annoying leaks when they pop up and find ways to make to our cars run better (more efficiently) than just the average driver who puts a car in gear and goes from point A to point B.
Our typical daily drivers will never dump out as many pollutants through the tailpipe that a hybrid dumps pre-production.
My biggest rant when it comes to the tree-huggers is the hypocrisy. Once upon a time I worked at the Midas store in Ithaca, NY. We call it San Francisco east, here. (It's unofficial motto is "ten square miles surrounded by reality.") Very liberal thanks to Cornell University and to a smaller extent, Ithaca College. It's a city full of tree huggers who would come into the store for an oil change, yet their cars would have four flat, bald tires, air filters that was so dirty you didn't even want to touch it, OE fuel filters that had never been changed, alignments which were so off it made it hard to even drive the cars through the parking lot, yet these same idiots looked down their noses at my Ramcharger as some devil-spawned polluting SUV.
A lot of our customers were Cornell professors. You know, those bastions of higher -and high minded - education sitting in the gilded halls of academia. Educated idiots. For all intents and purposes each and everyone of 'em fell into the category of "those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
The emissions laws here in NY (outside NYMA) make sense to me, in a way. Especially with the OBDII plug-in check. The vast majority of polluters to be caught aren't driving cars from the '80's, the '70's, or the '60's, it's the average every day driver cruising around in something just ten years old or newer, ignoring the check engine light while the car is throwing codes. I've even seen folks put a piece of electrical tape over the MIL so they can't see it. These are the same folks who hear their brakes grinding and turn up the radio. Then when the car doesn't pass inspection they acted surprised and outraged that they actually have to fix it.
And, like I said, these are cars that are ten years old or newer. For all the sophistication of the OBDII (and the OBDIII coming soon) the car may be smarter, but it doesn't make for a smarter driver.
