California is the car capital of the world. Perfect year-round weather and some truly spectacular roads mean enthusiasts flock in droves. But the Golden State is also regulatory hell on earth for classic car owners. Smog laws require all road-going vehicles built after 1976 to pass strict emissions tests, which can be overly costly and time-consuming, as our own David Tracy has dealt with firsthand. Senate Bill 712, also known as “Leno’s Law,” was supposed to fix that. Except it won’t. Because it’s dead.
The bill, which would’ve eliminated Smog checks for vehicles 35 years or older, died in California’s Assembly Appropriations Committee, a group of 11 assembly members that vote on whether bills reach the State’s full assembly for a vote. The news comes just four months after the proposal passed California’s Senate Transportation Committee with bipartisan support.
State Senator Shannon Grove, a republican representing Bakersfield who authored the bill, was understandably disheartened by the law’s failure to reach the assembly. From her website:
I am deeply disappointed that once again, the California state legislature did not prioritize California’s Classic car culture and the enthusiasts who were relying on this measure to pass. Leno’s Law would have simply allowed for a few additional classic car model years to receive a full smog exemption—a much-needed update on an antiquated law. Sadly, today California said no to helping preserve these rolling pieces of history and let down classic car clubs across the state from low riders, to hot rods and every American classic in between. Leno’s Law was not just about the cars, it was about the enthusiasts behind the wheel.
News of the bill’s demise came even as lawmakers sought to water down its effectiveness in an effort to keep it alive. They slapped on an amendment in June requiring vehicles to be registered with historic plates, and later, narrowed qualifying cars to those built between 1981 and 1986. But those efforts proved futile.
Senate Bill 712 had tons of support from the car community and beyond, not only from Jay Leno himself, but also from the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), which sought to have the law passed as a “practical solution for collector vehicle owners, allowing them to enjoy their passion without the burden of unnecessary regulations,” according to CEO Mike Spagnola. But health and climate change activists opposed its passing. Will Barrett, assistant vice president of the American Lung Association, told The Mercury News his organization was happy the bill died in the committee.
We’re pleased it’s not moving forward. From a public health perspective, this is a good outcome. It represented a step back from clean air protections. One of the things we really need to be on guard for is these bills that weaken the existing tools we have.
It’s true that Leno’s Law would’ve ultimately allowed more emissions into the atmosphere. The state’s Bureau of Automotive Repair told The Mercury News it expected to receive 17,500 requests every year for smog check exemptions had the bill passed. But the environmental impact would’ve likely been negligible. As my colleague Thomas Hundal pointed out back in March, the vehicles qualifying for an exemption are antiques registered as collector cars, which usually come with specific insurance that restricts usage and mileage. So it’s not like the law would be opening up a swath of highly polluting vehicles to everyday commuter use.
Alas, none of that matters anymore. With Leno’s Law dead, Californians will continue to suffer under the thumb of the State’s Smog Check laws for the foreseeable future. And with the State cracking down on out-of-state registrations—including well-known methods through Montana—vintage car owners have little to no recourse.
Top graphic images: depositphotos.com
It’s probably hard to take this bill seriously when there are National Guard troops sent to publicly intimidate you.
(Driving behind pickup trucks rolling coal.) *cough-cough* What was that? I wasn’t paying attention as I’m trying to survive this trip to pick up my kid.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this would have passed if we had a different president, but with California probably feeling very under attack around everything related to emissions and fuel economy regulations it’s no surprise they weren’t in a place to start making any exceptions, even plainly common sense ones.
Yet another reason why I’m glad I don’t live in CA. Not a bad place to visit, just wouldn’t live there.
You’ll be thankful at some point for California’s muscle. They’re the only thing standing in the way of the future dictatorship Trump is trying to set up.
And theyre doing such a great job!
Nevada had a problem with abuse of “classic vehicle” plates, because the 5000 mile cap was self-reported. There were lots of daily drivers on classic plates.
The legislative solution was to only issue “classic” plates to cars with “collector car” insurance policies. The legislature has abdicated responsibility to determine whether your 1995 Honda Civic is a “classic” to the likes of Hagerty, etc.
And that was part of the bill but the cost to verify mileage and/or collector car policies was part of the stated reason the bill got shelved. I don’t really buy that.
I was really happy when Emissions check program has been cancelled in Ontario Canada. it was determined that the amount of money province spends on keeping this program going far exceeds benefits as there are simply not too many old cars left to justify it, majority of the cars simply comply. Before 2022 (I think) it was cars manufactured 1987 and up. My W124 coupe was 1987 and I remember passing smog on that thing was fun.
I’m in Ontario as well and personally, I want them to bring back the testing
As a person with asthma (as well as having a daughter with asthma), I disagree that the little bit of money ($30-$35) spent on this exceeds the benefits.
In my view, even if just 5% of vehicles fail and have to be repaired or taken off the road, it’s worth it because that 5% of failing vehicles put out a disproportionate amount of pollution.
And the failure rate was 5-10% over the years that testing had to be done.
Also these tests were useful to help determine the ‘health’ of the vehicle.
Seriously… The $30-$35 that test cost is/was a pittance compared to all the other costs surrounding car ownership.
If you can afford a car, then you should be able to afford a cheap $35 emissions test.
And if your car fails, then fix it or scrap it. Your right to drive a given car doesn’t extend to causing a disproportional amount of pollution.
And this test was also beneficial for weeding out illegally modified vehicles… such as vehicles where owners removed the catalytic converters either for performance or cheapness reasons.
Same here. People are agitating in Oregon to remove emission testing because Washington state did. They say it is a waste of time because more than 90% of the cars pass the test. Those small number of cars put out a lot of pollution AND many people will not fix their car if they are not forced to do so. Remove testing and a bunch more cars will be driving around with disabled or damaged emission systems.
Clean air is good – paying $30 twice a year is a tiny amount to pay to keep that air quality from degrading further. (My wife also has asthma and there are still plenty of days that the air quality causes her problems)
I worked at a shop in King County just down the street from a test facility when they had just started emission testing. If you failed, you could get a waiver after spending $75 on repairs.
We sold SO many sets of uninstalled plugs, caps, rotors and wires to people it wasnt funny.
sorry if I was misleading and about your asthma.
what I was saying is that Ontario shut the program down not because of the $35fee but rather that the entire DriveClean program, all facilities, equipment and staff was costing too much to Province.
Wonder if there is a scientific study that supports this choice.
It wasn’t costing the province anything. The fees covered the cost. They dropped the fee from $35 to $30 because the program actually had a surplus at the $35 rate.
This program was cancelled mainly for political optics reasons, not because it actually cost the province anything.
if you know, what was a political reason behind it? not that i question, i sincerely wonder
Same reason they cancelled vehicle registration fees. Populism and a relatively cheap (finance wise) campaign promise.
next: no front license plate
So Doug Ford could say “I’m saving Working Class drivers money”
(please vote for me)
Yes
It is not the $30-$35 it costs to do the test. It is the cost to run the program. Those program are not self sustained by the $30 fees. You have to consider the cost to run the bureaucracy to keep records, inspect and enforce the regulations. The State of Washington ran the numbers and realized than less that 4% of all car fail the tests.
In addition, we are talking about classic cars, are you saying that if your classic car fails, you should just scrap it?
Some of the parts are not available anymore, and the State of CA does not allow to replace the parts even if they are an upgrade from the OEM parts.
But in reality, the cars are still here and and still being used. The owners just find work-arounds to use the cars.
And lastly. Many of those older cars would have been able to pass the emission test, have the standards remained the same as when the car was built. Instead, they are asked to pass a test the cars were never designed to pass.
“It is not the $30-$35 it costs to do the test. It is the cost to run the program”
Yes… and the test fees covered those costs.
“Those program are not self sustained by the $30 fees. “
Yes it was. The auditor general found that at $35 per test, it ran a surplus instead of being revenue neutral.
That’s why they dropped the cost here from $35 to $30.
“California is the car capital of the world”
This isn’t the Good Place. It’s the Bad Place.
It’s not easy being a gearhead here but any weekend I can go to a random cars and coffee here and see examples of cars that many people will never see in their lifetime.
But for how much longer?
Nothing has changed in regards to smog laws on existing cars in 20 years, and as someone who has their finger on the pulse of this topic I see nothing changing in the future to make things more restrictive.
New car sales are a whole different matter, so yeah maybe in 20 years from now things will look different.
Most of them have MT or AZ plates.
Also on any given weekend I can put the top down, point my car west, and go on a drive so beautiful there are multiple songs written about it.
Strictly bad timing. The bill was sponsored by a Republican, with no Democrats on board. Why? Right now, California (Democrats) are focused on stopping Trump and his redistricting plan. Anything that a Republican touches is essentially burned with fire. If the Trump issue didn’t exist, it could have turned out differently.
I’d believe this. There has been an attitude of “F*ck them!” growing since the Clinton presidency. Some of the state-mandated term limits don’t help, since politicians at the highest level aren’t around to deal with the aftermath of their ineffective leadership.
It very much is this. Cal state legislators are concentrating on the threat of Republicans pushing redistricting everywhere in the country to tip the mid term elections. There is no other priority right now. Very bad timing.
I seem to recall there was one or two D’s on board. But the rest (maybe 20+) co-sponsors were all R’s. This is just bad politics. Next time Leno needs to line up a bunch of D’s to make it bipartisan.
After we remove ourselves of the Fanta Menace.
That’s much easier to say than Tangerine Palpatine
The only way they could accomplish this will be with more restrictions like mileage and days cars are allowed to drive (Weekends+holidays) to make sure they are not daily driven, plus some type of special registration to show that you are allowed to drive those days. Maybe classic cars allowed to have this exception to smog if they show proof of current hybrid/ev ownership.
Slight correction: 1976 model year vehicles also require inspection.
Having SEMA advocate for the bill likely doomed it. They aren’t known for being good-faith participants in the discussion around emissions.
No they aren’t.
How are they not good faith participants?
They have always represented the commercial entities focused on making modifications easy, often overtly undermining emissions rules. Often, by claiming that the items sold and modifications done, which bypass a car’s emissions, aren’t their issue as long as they put “for off-road use only” stickers on stuff. They feign ignorance so they can make a buck.
Not that I needed any more reasons to not ever go to California but this is another one. I fully endorse California’s right to be freedom hating morons.
I’m a diehard gearhead but also a person who grew up in SoCal and remember days when kids and elderly were told to stay inside due to poor air quality. So as much as I hate that this makes my hobby harder, I also bristle at kneejerk comments like yours claiming California is restricting my freedom.
Ultimately I like the freedom of breathing better than my cars so I can’t immediately paint any efforts to improve air quality with a broad anti-freedom brush. I completely understand why people are frustrated the bill didn’t pass (many of whom don’t even live in CA but just love to take any opportunity to crap on it) but when I see responses like the one above I can only conclude that person is disingenuous, ill informed, or straight trolling.
This seems like a failure to think in quantitative terms about the problem, though. I’m also very pro-clean air! But you’re talking about niche hobbyists keeping museum pieces alive. This is 0.00001% of the pollution. When you choose to harass these people, you’re simply making a point of principal instead of actually affecting the air quality. Burning political capital for nothing. Just no sense if subtlety here.
They aren’t being “harassed.” They just aren’t being given special privilege. There is no inherent “right to pollute.”
They should be given a special privilege, because it costs nothing.
There is no “right to pollute.” There is a cost to me dumping toxic waste on your doorstep, just because pollution from a car is spread around doesn’t mean the cost disappears.
Bingo
Don’t disagree. If his post had more nuance that “CALIFORNIA BAD! COAL ROLL GOOD!” I won’t have called it out. But this is a common response to anything that California does. You don’t see me commenting on how to build tornado shelters in Iowa or pregnant women rejecting hospitals in Texas.
Can you dispense some advice on open-heart surgery?
I’ve always loved you.
this here. the fact that we cannot quantitatively say how much air pollution exactly belongs to old cars is the only reason this still exists because if it was the program would have been axed about 15-20 years ago.
it still did not stop VAG and others to do what they did so all these programs are BS.
There are plenty of studies on pollution by age of car – especially in California.
For example:
In California there are 4.8 million (19%) cars on the road 2003 and older. They drive 33 billion miles per year (12%) and produce 39,900 tons of NOx (73%).
That compares to 20.7 million passenger cars that are 2004 and newer (81%). They drive 253 billion miles per year (88%) and produce 14,500 tones of NOx (27%)
Cleaner Cars Cleaner Air | Union of Concerned Scientists
very interesting. today i learned something new.one thing is still hard to believe is that they drive 33 billion miles.thanks for the reference too, good read
That study was released in 2023 and looked at cars 20 years and older. I’m not surprised people are daily driving cars from the 80’s and 90’s. I see a bunch on the road every day.
When my dad visits us in Oregon he is always amazed at the number of old cars on the road. He lives in Michigan where most cars 20 years or older have rusted away.
I daily 1997 2.8L BMW with inline 6.
my commute is about 15-16 miles both ways per day, 4 days a week. car has 75k miles and in perfect shape. so i drive about 100 miles per week with weekends
at this many miles, wonder how long will the emissions incurred making a new car will offset my current dirty car.
While that is true, this is a problem that will gradually solve itself. As older cars fall by the wayside the fleet get cleaner.
The problem solves itself faster when you require owners of old cars to maintain their vehicles and keep their emission systems working.
The solution is not to allow people with old cars unlimited pollution by removing smog checks.
Thanks for bringing facts to the table. This is a topic I’m passionate and pretty informed about and would have chimed in more but I’ve been offline at a funeral all day.
As long as the facts that you linked to exist, I don’t see any changes happening in the law. Even outside of any R-pushed bill being wholesale rejected in CA at the moment, as soon anyone says that this will negatively impact air quality, it’s game over. Yes, I know there are bigger fish to fry as far as air pollution goes, but ultimately this bill mainly benefitted hobbyists and in the eyes of the general public that’s likely not enough to justify dirtier air.
As a gearhead who owns a highly modified 1985 car in California it pains me to say all of this and for the sake of my hobby I wish it were easier to be a gearhead here, but as a person who grew up with asthma in SoCal and remembers air quality alert days, ultimately I can’t be too upset at efforts to improve air quality. I definitely have conflicting feelings.
Appreciate your perspective and logic. Thank you.
The problem is old cars don’t cause 0.00001% of the pollution. 2003 and older cars cause 73% of the passenger vehicle NOx in California.
A small number of vehicles putting out massively more pollution per mile adds up.
The freedom hating morons are the ones in charge of the federal government. Here in California we love our freedom to lead the nation in forward thinking governance. This was a well-meaning, but poorly put together bill. California has the best car culture in the country and you’re more than welcome to continue to be jealous of it.
Your definition of freedom must be different than mine.
Clearly. It’s always interesting to me that the people who seem to hate California the most are the people who have never been here. Keep on being part of the uninformed masses that are the reason this country is completely screwed.
Wow.
I think the people leaving the state in droves hate it as well. Like the CEO of In and Out burger.
For one, they’re not leaving the state in droves. As a matter of fact, California’s population increased last year. Also, there are a lot of reasons people move. It is expensive here and that being a reason people move doesn’t mean they hate it. It’s expensive because it’s nice and there are a lot of desirable places. Also, a lot of people who do leave regret it. And the In n Out CEO specifically said she doesn’t hate it. But, enjoy your fantasy world. Pretty typical of folks like you.
I endorse your right to live wherever you want, enjoy
As a San Diegan with a 1985 car and a moderator in the Californians for Classic Car Smog Exemptions Facebook group, this is a major blow, but not unexpected. I could go into a whole diatribe about this.
I put a lot of work into getting my 425 HP stroker swapped car to be smog legal and sure enough it passed easily on Saturday, but I realize not everyone has the time or resources to do as much homework as I did.
On that note, I checked the mileage on my last two smog checks and I drove that car 2300 miles in just under 2 years, which is likely a similar story for many older cars like mine.
Just curious- did you use the 35 year visual check exemption? How was that process?
No, I go through a 100% legit normal smog. I have a binder of printed out CARB EOs for all of the aftermarket parts on the engine, and even a printed photo of the CARB EO # stamped on the cats under the car. But I’ve been going to the same smog guy for 20 years too which helps.
Anecdotally, I’ve only heard of one person successfully using the 35 year visual smog check exemption, and that took like 6 months and involving the help of a local congressman. This is per the founder of the Californians For Classic Car Exemptions Facebook group who would know more about this probably more than anyone not working for the DMV.
I think here in PA anything 25 or older is emissions exempt. Also, less than 5000 miles annualy is automatically exempt. This seems reasonable.
Nobody here is dailying a 30 year old car.
TBH, any EFI car from the mid-eightys on is probably fine. Nobody here is dailying a carburetor anymore.
One of my kids lives in Philadelphia and DDs a 28-year-old car; he still sees plenty of cars the same model and era as his being driven on the reg. (For those of you wondering, it’s a Toyota Camry. No surprise, ha.) Last time I visited him up there, around Halloween, I noted a decent number of cars from the 80s still being driven as daily drivers in his neighborhood. So guess it depends on where you live.
As for me in TN, the two vehicles I DD are 42 years old and 36 years old, lol.
Probably should have said 40 yr old car. About the last old cars I see regularly are 80’s OBS Ford and SquareBody GMC trucks. Most of the rest have rusted into the ground.
I still see ’90s cars on occasion.
Cars last 25 years in PA? Wow, I didn’t think that was possible. Must be a land of holy grails.
Does PA do safety inspections? I’d probably be more concerned about the condition of the other mechanical and frame parts.
Saftey Inspection is the big one, only the most populous counties require emissions. Brakes, bearings, ball joints, lights, tires, horn, rust. Most cars up here were toast after 10-15 years in my youth TBH. It is really only since the late ’80s that corrosion protecton was good enough to keep a daily on the road for longer.
That’s in PA, where most of them rust out before the 20-year mark. In most of California, that doesn’t really happen.
I follow legislative activity as part of my job, albeit in a different field. The issues with this bill are only somewhat due to the content.
While previous committee votes were bipartisan, there were no democratic co-authors/sponsors. The (shitty) reality of the CA legislature right now is that any exclusively R bill is dead in committee. Period. The state Democratic Party largely sees itself at war with the Republican Party at large. Hence calling for a special election to undo a very good law that everyone likes just to try and undo R shenanigans in other states (eliminate the independent redistricting commission).
Laws like this typically are better done as part of funding omnibus trailer bills. Most alterations to current California code happen in the large trailer bills each spring. That way it’s 1) easier to negotiate give and take in different areas and 2) there’s a deadline to get it all done. But to do that you need to be invited to that table, and currently as an R that takes work.
Finally the functional problem is the average person on the street doesn’t understand what’s currently wrong. If it’s an old car it needs smog. If it can’t pass smog it must be a heavy polluter. What’s the problem? Most constituents in most areas would be upset if they heard their rep voted for this, as the current problems are somewhat nuanced.
Yep, horrible timing for any R to push anything through in CA no matter how good it is.
And as you know (since you’re following it closely) triple horrible to negotiate a change in appropriations that would create a new cost. And 2 months after the budget is signed. Total governance failure.
Damn. Same exact thought. The politicians are concentrating on some really big issues right now. The timing of this bill is what killed it.
I think you put aside all the fud and got down to the real issue.
Isn’t Trump gutting CARB anyway?
There is always a teeny-tiny little highly-tarnished silver lining to every cloud.
A return to heavy pollution is a silver lining? No thanks.
No. He would need Congress to pass a bill changing the Clean Air Act to do that – which takes 60 votes in the Senate – which the GOP does not have.
They did try to revoke two very specific CARB waivers – Advanced Clean Cars II and HD NOx rules. They used the Congressional Review Act to do that because the CRA only requires a 51 vote margin to pass. They did that even though the GAO and Senate parliamentarian said they couldn’t. They also voted on the bill after the CRA review window expired. So as expected CARB states have sued.
Even if CARB states lose and a court finds that the Senate doesn’t have to follow their own rule or laws – CARB is not gone – we just revert to Advanced Clean Cars 1
CARB is also in the process of writing Advanced Clean Cars III – in case they lose the above lawsuit.
However, none of the above made it into the headlines of the articles that proclaimed “Trump Revokes CARB’s Waiver”.
I don’t actually think it would matter even if he did, because the next Democratic administration is going to undo pretty much everything Trump did anyway.
Just like last time. Trump rolled back Obama’s CARB requirements and Biden flipped them right back with 8 and 10% fuel economy increases per year to put CAFE requirements right back to where they would have been with a Trump rollback.
Crazy thing this time is Trump didn’t both to change CAFE. Just set the fine to zero so the system is till in place just waiting for a future administration to flip it back in with all the accumulated debits and credits.
Of course. Which is why I have said that no automaker with any brains is going to change much strategy based on what the orange buffoon is doing today. But I can see making some hay while the sun shines.
I actually think it’s good this didn’t pass.
Even in my neighborhood, I can tell how much more pollution old classic cars (as well as motorcycles) spew compared to modern cars by simply driving behind them.
I like old cars.
But as someone with asthma, I like clean air more.
And David Tracy’s hopes of getting his old Jeep J10 registered actually reinforces my view.
If the law passed creating that loophole, you just know there are gonna be a lot of people using that loophole to register high pollution heaps of shit to use as cheap daily drivers.
And calling them ‘classics’ is a stretch.
With old beat up vehicles like David Tracy’s Jeeps, the best way to get them CARB-compliant would be to convert them to BEVs.
With safety inspections still in force, wouldn’t the “heaps of shit” be less likely to be daily drivers?
What safety inspections? You can roll in to the smog station with unmatched 15+ year old tires and two missing brake pads and pass.
Yup. I gave up my emission testing license here in CA close to a decade ago but the rolling shitpiles that would come in for testing never ceased to astound me. Didnt matter as long as they passed the smog test.
I only refused to test a vehicle if I thought it would blow up on the dyno or damage my equipment but otherwise I ran it. If I didnt, the guy down the street would.
I confess I’m ignorant to it all, living in Kentucky.
California doesn’t have any safety inspections. It doesn’t rain here, no corrosion problems like back east where cars are disintegrating before your eyes.
however, there is no structural inspection of rebuilt total loss vehicles here in the reregistration process which completely amazes me, especially for a state that often deserves the “nanny state” moniker it gets.
They don’t even need to be daily drivers. If they are polluting 100-200x the amount of a modern vehicle, even driving once a month will be way worse than a daily driven cleaner vehicle. If they are truly collector vehicles, it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to upgrade the emissions systems as well.
You *can’t* upgrade the emissions equipment. That is part of why the law as it stands now is so stupid. It has to be exactly as it left the factory. You are literally not allowed to make it better.
100% bullshit. You can engine swap from a newer vehicle as long as all the emissions equipment from the donor vehicle is present.
See the 1985 Ford LTD in my garage with a legal 425 HP ‘93 Mustang engine swap for example.
That is a wholesale engine swap. You cannot improve the emissions equipment of the OEM engine. For example, you can’t remove the original God-awful thermal reactors and injections system from a ’77 BMW 5-series and replace them with the catalytic converters and more modern injection system from an ’81. I guess *technically* you could swap the whole ’81 engine – but why waste an otherwise identical engine? Or catalytic converters and a modern stand-alone injections system, for that matter, even if both options would result in a much cleaner car.
Fair point. I was responding in context to David’s J10. An engine swap likely is the easiest option instead of trying to find or upgrade 40 year old parts from an orphaned manufacturer.
You can’t get 40yo emissions parts from many OEMs these days – which is a big part of the problem. Or if you can, hold onto your wallet!
And it *wildly* distorts the classic car marketplace with pre-76 cars significantly more valuable than 76-on models of the same cars.
Don’t disagree. Just saying there is a path forward. You clearly understand this. Some people love to spread the false narrative that modifications or engine swaps are completely verboten here.
It’s not a realistic path for *collectors* – who value originality highly but want to drive their cars occasionally too.
That is true. Again, my comments here were primarily in context of DT’s J10.
So not exactly “100% bullshit” then, correct?
I already conceded to Kevin’s point above?
Yes, but it is such an absurdly dumb comment that you deserve to be publicly shamed for it.
But it’s not. My statement is still correct. Kevin said:
You *can’t* upgrade the emissions equipment. That is part of why the law as it stands now is so stupid. It has to be exactly as it left the factory. You are literally not allowed to make it better.
We’re getting into semantics here, but it depends on your definition of “upgrade emissions equipment.” Kevin is correct that you can’t just mix and match existing emissions equipment on an original engine, however I’m also correct in that a full engine swap IS permissible if you bring all the emissions equipment from the donor vehicle. No, that is not cheap, easy, or practical, but it IS a path forward which would result in upgraded emissions equipment being installed on the vehicle.
For the 3rd time, my response was primarily in context of David’s J10, and admittedly was also a kneejerk response from me because I incorrectly thought Kevin was another crayon eater on the internet who falsely believes you can’t modify cars in any way in CA. Clearly that is not the case.
that illegal 93′ mustang engine will be out of compliance as well, it is just a matter of time.
Based on what? I have no reason to believe that ’93 Mustang engine won’t be legal for as long as I live.
emissions, same reason
Again, based on what? Please, share with the class any articles, links, or any other evidence that the state is actively pursuing any action to take older cars off the road.
As a person who actively has the finger on the pulse of this topic (I moderate a 6000 member Facebook group dedicated to classic car smog exemptions and we see nothing like this on the horizon, but I’m happy to see anything you have that says otherwise.
The issue is that defining “upgrade” isn’t easy and ripe for abuse. Also, the number of modifications that will result in real improvements is likely to be negligible compared to the size of the issue to begin with.
The number of people who would bother to do any of this is so negligible in the reality of 36M cars on the road in CA that it rounds to “who gives a shit”. Let collectors drive a relative handful of old cars for some relatively negligible number of miles a year and don’t worry about it. Require collector plates with appropriate restrictions (as most states do) and call it a day.
All the current regime does is boost the values of pre-’76 cars.
But by those standards, none of us should care about carving out a special privilege either. A ’78 Nova driven 1000 miles a year likely pollutes multiple times more than a 2015 Corolla driven 20k miles a year, which doesn’t quite pass a standard emissions test. Why give one a pass and not the other?
Because even if the Nova DOES pass an emissions test, it is still polluting 20X as much, and on old cars the difference between “as clean as it can be” and “broken” isn’t actually a whole lot, because so much of the emissions of old cars is evaporative, not tailpipe. So what is the point?
You make it so that any vehicle that gets the exemption has a mileage limit so it *isn’t* going to be driven 20K miles a year. Again – what most states already do. For example, in Maine, my two cars that are registered as antiques are exempt from inspections, but I have to have at least one car with a “regular” registration subject to inspection, and I am prohibited from “daily driving” them – restricted to pleasure use only. Sure, “not daily driving” is nebulous, but reality is that if you drive more than a few thousand miles a year, the state WILL pull your antique registration. And my insurance limits me to 3000 miles a year anyway. Which I haven’t even come close to since I registered them as antiques. The Spitfire hasn’t broken 1000 miles in a year in decades, and often less than 500.
Let’s be clear. Most of those cars would pass the emissions test for the year they were made. The problem is that the emission standards and test have been made more stringent than the original standards.
Maybe, but if they don’t need to be checked, that isn’t really a factor.
A big part of the issue is that when one of the leading advocates, SEMA, is well known for purposely subverting emissions requirements on new cars, it becomes very difficult to find their claims credible.
Sure. But just because SEMA is sketchy, it doesn’t mean that the bill does not make sense.
True, but it doesn’t mean it does either. The issue is that the bill provides no real enforcement of any standards for cars older than 35 years. Not even to meet the standards of 1990. Which means those cars could be polluting at any level, legally.
The requirements for collector plates and insurance are meaningless since there is no way to reasonably enforce the collector plate use limits, and anyone can get an insurance company to sell them a policy.
It was a poorly structured law that was advocated for by an industry group that celebrates coal rolling. If collectors wanted to pass a reasonable law, they would have told SEMA to go away and made the limits on the use of exempt cars enforceable. They didn’t.
There may be some sketchy insurance companies. But I know State Farm, Hagerty & Grundy are not going to ensure your Jalopy as a Classic Car. You can put the burden of proof on the insurance companies.
As you say, it cannot be enforced, then it is the same with Montana plates, with less limit on mileage.
The law would spawn numerous insurance companies willing to help people jump through the loophole. There was nothing in the bill to enforce any requirements for insurance companies, and there isn’t any realistic way to do so. It was a terrible bill.
Penalties for using the Montana plate loophole should be increased to include forfeiture of any vehicle on which it is used and a couple of weeks of jail time for the owner. Start with the highest value cars and work your way down. Crushing a few Bugattis should grab a little attention.
It really should be very simple – does it pass a sniffer test? That is all that should matter. How you get there should not matter at all.
It matters if the system is designed to be removed or switched off immediately after the test. Given the history of the modification community and industry, it surely would be. Also, as to your other comment, if much of the pollution is evaporative, a sniffer test won’t cover it.
You aren’t “switching things off” in a 40yo car anymore than you can *already* retune the thing to pass, then retune it for max power after the test. And there is no testing for evaporative emissions on old cars to start with. That is one of the things that a modern ODB-II system does test for (why a loose or bad gas cap will set a CEL, for example), but pre-1996, nope. They are what they are.
Certainly anything new enough to be OBD-II needs to have a working CEL that isn’t lit to pass inspection. Which is the standard in Maine.
I am replying to your comment about allowing modifications in general. The standard for 40-year-old cars is that they meet the standard of the year it was produced. If modifications are allowed, that standard can no longer be enforced.
So what standards does a modified car need to meet? How can that standard meaningfully be defined for an endless number of variations? What is the cost of the enforcement, and will classic car owners be willing to pay for it? There are no reasonable answers to the first two questions and the answer to the last one is “no way!”
They should need to meet the tailpipe emissions standards for the year in question. I am perfectly fine with that. California goes WAAAAY beyond that.
And ultimately – why 1976? That was arbitrary considering emissions standards and testing in CA started a decade earlier.
Agreed in principle to emissions requirements based on the year of manufacture. But again, modifications allow any number of items that would allow the owner to subvert the system after the test.
Also, at some point, the year of manufacture no longer becomes a reasonable measure. Especially given how much dirtier old cars are.
Also, when you look at any law closely enough, it can always appear arbitrary.
Even in CA, there aren’t enough old cars left to matter, and fewer by the day. They only seem common because they stand out to those of us used to seeing nothing much older than 15 regularly. That someone might try to cheat is neither here nor there, nowhere near enough people would even know how for it to make any difference.
I’m actually rather shocked that you don’t see these emissions requirements as a tax on the poors who rely on cars to get around.
Pollution is a tax on “the poor” as well. Feigning concern about people with lower income doesn’t really hold water for the folks in SEMA and their ilk. I’d be fine with a rule that states fines are forgiven for anyone below a certain network or income. They have a need for transportation, a dude who wants to drive a blown ’78 Nova as a toy doesn’t need to be given grace.
You can’t have it both ways; you can’t claim that there aren’t enough old cars to matter and then claim there are enough to justify a carve-out. Just as you can’t say modified systems should be allowed, and we should hold cars to the standards of the year in which they were built.
Also, your claim about the number of cars older than 15 years is clearly not accurate. The average age of vehicles on the road is around 13 years old.
In the end, there is no right to pollute. If people want the ability to have toys that pollute
Well said.
The average is heavily weighted by all the new cars sold. Past 15 or so years, the population drops off fast. Probably even faster today given how easily cars are “mechanically totaled”. I expect that average to start dropping in the next decade or two. We largely solved rust then figured out how to ruin mechanicals.
I simply think there needs to be a reasonableness standard here. 25-30 years is probably reasonable, but at this point OBD-II cars are nearly 30, and I think any OBD-II car should have to pass a simple “is the CEL lit” test – they are effectively self-monitoring. Or a simple sniffer test should suffice (who cares how you get there), and beyond that, at some point (40 years?) who cares, there aren’t enough to matter. CA just seems to take this to the level of harassment of old car owners at this point, and then says “<’75, who cares, >’76, screw you”. One of many reasons I would never, ever live there.
If the bill just wanted the cars to be judged by the year it was produced, I think that would be reasonable. But that isn’t what the bill was.
It produced an unenforceable loophole that allowed any car over a certain age, which isn’t really that old, to produce as much pollution as the owner wanted. That isn’t reasonable, especially when it is being promoted by an organization that overtly subverted existing emissions laws.
The CEL light test is laughably meaningless given how easy it would be to defeat. The test should check that it meets the rules under which it was produced. So, checking to ensure the systems are still in place and sniffer or other tests as required to verify.
Everyone gets to keep the cars they want under the original terms. If that had been proposed, I would be all for it. But it wasn’t. It was a bad bill despite the “good intentions” wrapper.
If you live in Florida, I can safely say your judgment on where to live is worse than useless.
Most people aren’t so ambitious as to cheat the system. Those who will are statistically meaningless.
As to your Florida comment – you can fuck right off. I bought a perfectly nice house here for $90K eight years ago. Which means I can afford to have summer and winter homes. And invest, and have lots of fun cars to play with. And no state income tax sucking away my hard earned money to the tune of $20K a year. That says *volumes* about my judgement as to where to live. If you want to buy a nearly identical house, but with street parking, for over $1M (as one of my clients did at the same time), then SoCal is the place for you. I don’t find the weather there THAT nice, and I will take hurricanes over wildfires every time. And if people with a brain don’t live here and vote – nothing will ever change.
SEMA is an organization that has spent millions cheating the system along with hundreds of vendors and shops. They wouldn’t do that for an insignificant number of potential customers. Your statement is 100% wrong.
Florida just removed all vaccination requirements for kids. It is truly a cesspool of idiocy. The fact that you decided to voluntarily jump in headfirst to save a few bucks confirms my earlier statement.
Any rollback of the law needs to include NOT allowing people to just use old cars as daily drivers and still be exempt. That isn’t hard to do. In my state, in order to have a car registered as an antique and be exempt from inspection, you have to have at least one “normally” registered car. And antique-registered cars are prohibited from being daily drivers. “Pleasure use only”. Which is slippery, but people do get nailed for it on occasion. And realistically, most collector cars are on collector car insurance policies, which have strong prohibitions on when, how, and how much you can use them anyway. And they are generally picky about WHAT you can insure that way – no hoopties just because they are old enough. So a very easy problem to solve – it can’t be your only car, and you have to have collector car insurance to get the exemption, not a standard unlimited use policy.
This.
Well, the bill required the cars to have Classic Car Insurance, so no “heaps of shit” would be used as daily drivers. Instead, the heap of shit are still in the road with the owners finding creative ways to do it.
Yes, there seemed to be a massive disconnect between the bill’s language (largely: if your classic vehicle qualifies for (occasional use) and has classic car insurance, it doesn’t need to be smogged) versus what some internet pundits interpreted: “yay – my daily driver unmaintained 1982 Olds Cutlass doesn’t need to be smogged anymore, cold starts be damned.”
It never was the latter.
I have absolutely zero issues with wanting emissions standards.
The “cannot have smog equipment modified” part annoys me. Why not just have a requirement that the vehicle meets or exceeds the emissions requirements of the original vehicle?
I’m willing to bet it’d be pretty easy to pass a modern fuel injected V8 with a couple of high flows.
Hell, you could have a whole cottage industry of “Cali-spec” tunes that make sure they stay within guidelines.
I remember in the late 90’s Hot Rod magazine did such a project. IIRC it was a ’55 Chevy, they added cats and whatnot and it complied with emissions regs of a much newer model car.
Likely because modifications make it very easy to defeat the controls as soon as the test is complete.
Our emissions guy (transit buses in Canada) is fully mobile. he just drives around between our 4 garages testing vehicles on-site. Tablets with cellular data and lithium power packs changed the game.
It’d be pretty easy to make a mobile compliance unit. Spot checking on a regular basis with 4-digit fines that compound with repeated infractions would probably be enough to deter.
If a new legislative framework could be accompanied by significant enforcement, as you outline, it could potentially work. The issue is that by the time you raise the fines high enough to discourage wealthy folks from complying, you have relegated regular folks to debtors’ prison. That could be dealt with by scaling fines based on wealth/income, but that tends to be a non-starter in the U.S..
Three strikes rule. After the 3rd offense, you can choose to have the car retrofitted by an authorized shop at your expense, or the car will be seized and crushed.
The disproportionate cost relative to income persists. Plus, for cars that are driven rarely, the chances that they will ever be stopped once is almost nothing, much less three times. Inspections don’t work well. Plus, police don’t have the right to pull over people just to do spot checks based on a feeling. It would likely get struck down in court.
The only way to make enforcement viable is to piggyback on the existing system, where cars need to pass in order to be registered/licensed. The solution isn’t perfect, but it is the only viable one.
Up here in my province we have the MTO officers (Ministry of Transportation Ontario) aka the “Green Hornets”.
Their sole M.O. is making sure vehicles are road legal and can pull any of them for a roadside inspection. They normally only do commercial vehicles, but they can hit personal as well. They monitor both safety and emissions.
The enforcement has to be it’s own body. They need to be taking responsibilities away from Police, not adding more.
It would be interesting to know how many times the “Green hornets” pull over people and what the chances are for every mile driven.
Also, the legal frameworks are relatively different, however. Most states require officers to have reasonable suspicion of an infraction before they can pull somebody over. It is a protection put in as an attempt to mitigate the fact that police officers typically would use pretextual stops to harass minorities. I wouldn’t want to forego that since the protections here are so few and far between.
Here’s some stats on their commercial enforcement.
Limiting their scope to vehicular infractions and not driver infractions would help a lot.
The hard part is that there is no visual assessment for emissions, so no reasonable suspicion can be made to justify a stop. There is zero chance that law enforcement in the U.S. would ever refrain from using any allowed stop to harass whomever they wished to harass. Especially now.
The stats are interesting, but don’t really cover the main point, which is how likely drivers are to be pulled over and inspected. If it is once every 100k miles, there is an insignificant chance that a classic car driven 1000 miles a year will be pulled over even once much less three times. Commercial drivers often drive over 100k miles a year, which changes the incentive structure immensely.
It would also be hard to quantify the data as you’re driving less, but also in a much smaller target window of enforcement.
You’d have to pull the data of registrations, cross it with yearly mileage, then divide it by average total daily inspections.
I agree that making it part of registration is probably the easiest. I feel like compliance would be easier if the program wasn’t as strict as it currently is.
Combining the registration WITH on-street enforcement would help immensely. Hell, set up pop-up inspection stations and have an inspection blitz on main roads.
That’s how they hit the commercial trucks.
Because oil and fuel vapor emissions are not measured at the tailpipe so a visual inspection of those related components is needed to confirm they’re at least present.
You can mod CA cars with CARB approved parts. You can also do engine swaps if the new engine is newer and you keep all the emission equipment from the donor vehicle. Or swap in a fully CARB approved crate engine like the one below
E-ROD Crate Engine & Transmission Package – LS3, 6.2L, 430HP Chevy Performance Crate Engine – JEGS
“But the environmental impact would’ve likely been negligible”
And you base this on what? 17,000 requests for exemption a year sounds like it would’ve likely NOT been negligible to me.
In the context of a state with 35.9 *million* registered vehicles? I would call that the definition of “negligible”.
It may be. But let’s see some actual facts and figures instead of assumptions and outrage.
The numbers are right there. 17K potential exemptions per year vs. 35.9M registered vehicles is not even rounding error, even if all 17K were literally “rolling coal”.
There are 30 something million vehicles registered in CA, and the exemption requests would overwhelmingly be going to collector or historic vehicles driven far fewer miles than a normal car.
This is on the order of hundredths of a percent change in emissions.
Maybe. Let’s see facts and figures, please. The pure numbers probably don’t tell the whole story. You can’t assume a 1:1 equivalency. How much pollution would these actually contribute?
The law was defeated. You got your wish. There’s no point litigating further.
But I will say that I believe it’s incumbent on the person making the bold claim to back it up with facts. 0.05% of the vehicles in CA, all of which were required to be on a low mileage collector policy, making a notable difference compared to the other 99.95%, which can be driven unlimited miles, is a bold claim.
I drive about 20,000km/year. My ’86 Mercedes sees about 2000-4000 of those kilometers (depending if road trips happened that summer).
The reality is that a lot of folks don’t put bulk mileage on their classics.
Even Rob Dahm, with all of his fire breathing rotaries, commutes in a friggin Honda Insight.
This law just puts more value on pre-’76 cars.
The very low mileage these cars are driven. If the law passed and they were all mileage restricted to 5k, then it wouldn’t be significant. It’s the same way that every Lambo ever made pollutes less than a single model year of Corollas, because the Corollas are driven, and the Lambos are not. Don’t quote me on that statistic, but I know there was a legitimate measurement study that concluded something similar, I just do not recall what the economy car was that was used in it.
Well there are 30 million cars registered in California, I would consider 5 hundredths of a singe percent to be negligible.
I do admit that I’m appalled at the cloud of smoke from the tailpipes of classic cars at my local car show when they start up. It stinks up an entire block for several minutes. And when I say, “stinks up”, I’m not just referring to the smell. The lungs know that is bad for them.
This doesn’t bode well for the prospects of retreating from the ill-considered and even more oppressive EV mandate in less than a decade’s time.
It’s maximal virtue signaling all the way down, no compromise, no retreat, no sense of rationality.
Once again, they’ve fallen for the Nirvana Fallacy and let perfect be the enemy of good.
This^ There are way bigger targets that would make more impact. Example: There are about 1,000 cruise ship voyages sailing from just CA every year. One cruise ship burns 60,000 gallons of fuel, or more, per day at sea! Cancel one boat and you could register every classic car in the state and still be ahead.
Cruise ships are big money. Laws aren’t for them in Cali.
A. People don’t care about pollution generated out at sea – they care about the smog in their cities.
B. The USA has required low sulfur fuel in US waters for years and it is require internationally since 2020
C. CARB is cracking down on ships and requiring them to use shore power or external pollution controls when in port. The ship yard across from my work was making barges with external exhaust aftertreatments a few years ago.
2024 Shore Power Enforcement | California Air Resources Board
I think the issue here is that nobody wants to cap the number of cars allowed but that’s really what needs to happen. It would be simple to say “the Bureau of Automotive Repair can only approve a certain number of smog exemptions per year.”
California needs to fix the donut hole that is opening, but they’re trapped in their car-centric urban architecture, where the densest parts of the state effectively require a private vehicle to go anywhere or do anything.
The issue they’re worried about isn’t a collector with an LS swap or someone obsessively polishing their Radwood-era Geo Tracker. It’s about people dailying cars with non-functional emissions equipment from the mid-90s.
But wouldn’t an easy fix to this just be like most states do require them to be registered as classic/antique/show car and only allowing x amount of miles per year to be driven if you don’t not want to require emission testing but if driving more then the x amount of miles you either have to pass emissions or get it fixed or else get fined?
The issue is enforcement. I see people daily collector plate cars in Washington all the time and it’s awesome when you choke on their exhaust in traffic.
Would it be that hard to require you to go the the DMV/BMV each year and they can get an odometer read out there? For Indiana I have to go to the BMV each year to get my show car exemption for my Firebird.
Apparently it is that hard. They got rid of emissions checks 5 or so years ago and that was just slapping an OBD reader in your car every 2 years.
The cost to validate collector insurance and verify mileage was part of the stated reason the bill was shelved
The problem is scale. California has 32 million cars on the roads. You have to limit the number not just the mileage — lots of people drive 10 miles per day in bumper-to-bumper LA traffic, for example.
I think the biggest problem is that when that 40-year-old sniffer equipment breaks down at the testing station or the last guy who knows what the smog controls on a 1982 vacuum-carb car are supposed to look like enough to feel confident signing a legal document to that effect retires, they don’t get fixed or a new guy trained.
The shop just hangs out an “OBDII Only” sign.
That is a real problem. Lots of smog shops don’t want to maintain old equipment.
Yeah, the shop I worked at let their dyno service contract expire and once it broke – they just stopped doing them. Not enough of them coming in the door to justify the expense. They always took 2-3x as long to do than the straight OBD and visual inspection, especially if you had to check timing and run the EVAP.
The guy I go to says he somehow has become a go to place for some fleets which have trucks that require a BAR 97 smog so he said that has been motivation to keep his equipment running. I’m not really familiar with the rules for trucks as far as that goes.
Even on the common mid-90s old junk, I might argue:
A) even cars like that are becoming rarer by the day, and
B) there’s something to be said for squeezing maximum utility out of a car that already exists versus forcing it to be scrapped while still functional and replacing it with a new car whose environmental production cost is greater than zero
I know of someone who used to drive an old S10 on collector plates and after seeing him go back and forth to work every day in it for a while, a cop promptly pulled him over and issued a citation. I’m surprised more of that doesn’t happen.
That would require cops to pull cars over for even obviously-illegal condition.
Right – they aren’t interested in fix-it tickets and small fines. That cop was bored or looking for a reason to harass the guy. Like window tinting or noise violations, if you don’t look sketchy or manage to get pulled over for speeding you can pretty much do what you want.
My personal “this is obviously illegal but nobody ever gets pulled over for it” is the wheels/tires extending past the body line. Unless you’re at H2O, no cop is writing that fix-it ticket (even though it’s a very obviously safety-related regulation).
Second favorite is just ‘tint so dark you can’t see pedestrians outside at night’
NY added a window tint check to the annual inspection, so there’s no more playing dumb – if you tinted the windows you know what you were doing (devil’s advocate, there were (and are) plenty of tint shops happy to install illegal tint for you so why would the average person think it was illegal?). My maybe hot-take: Cars with tinted windshields should immediately be impounded – that’s next-level dumb shit.
The morons with the bald mud tires sticking out 3 inches past the fenders are all stickered up with Blue Lives Matter shit, so obviously they aren’t being harrassed.
Everyone with blackout tint in NYC also has Georgia or Pennsylvania plates anyway.
But I agree — conditions that make the car unsafe to drive (rather than something like a single taillight which is less immediately dangerous) should require correction before the car can be on public roads.
> the densest parts of the state effectively require a private vehicle to go anywhere or do anything.
Just wanna say I live in a fairly urban area in CA and daily a bicycle. It’s not all LA.
That is why the bill required Classic Car Insurance, so that the daily driven cars with non-functional emissions equipment from the mid-90’s did not get an exemption.
That really sucks but not really surprised wouldn’t expect something like this to pass or even get beat passing in Cali but in reality really how many 35+ year old cars are really driving on the road in Cali that this law really would affect the environment at all? I am sure that private jet some Hollywood big wig is taking to New York and back is putting off more then what many of these cars would be putting off for years.
More than you’d think. Look at DT’s videos about what he sees driving around the Valley.
New York and most of the New England states that signed on to CA emissions only ever did so for OBDII cars since by the time it was allowed it was known that pre-OBDII cars were already starting to rust their way out of the vehicle fleet. Garages simply wouldn’t have the time for the cost of sniffer equipment to amortize.
The reason why the focus was placed on cars was that the original concern that led to emissions laws in the first place was point-of-use pollution in the LA basin and Bay Area population centers.
Living in western NY, rust kills a lot of cars a year. Traveling down to the southern US, there were a lot of old cars still driving around.
Perfect weather plus the absolute scale of CA means there’s tons.
“but in reality really how many 35+ year old cars are really driving on the road in Cali that this law really would affect the environment at all?”
In places where the roads don’t get salted, it’s a lot.
And one old car puts out the emissions of over 100 regular ICE cars… and probably over 1000 modern hybrids… let alone BEVs.
Hah true being from the salt belt it is pretty rare to see cars that are 20+ years on the road that are dailies anything like that is normally a classic for nice weather.
There are more older vehicles on the road here than you’d think.
Polk says there are over 4 million 1976-1987 cars and light trucks still registered in the US.
I’m guessing that’s not broken down by state? The data I have access to isn’t.
Nope – according to the DOE, California has just under 13% of the nations vehicles. Assuming that percentage holds for this year range gives about 500K 1976-1987s here.
I see a lot of 80’s trucks driving around here in Oregon.
They really shot themselves in the foot killing the bill. I can completely understand the fear of those that grew up in CA in the smog era. The simple reality is that people are titling non-compliant cars in Montana or other gray area states, driving them as much as they want due to that state having no restrictions, and polluting more in CA, while CA get zero registration money from the cars that are being operated there.
Also like mentioned, any impact from these cars would be insanely negligible, and in some cases, giving an exemption to update ignition and emissions systems would actually reduce emissions, but the current system is so archaic it’s not allowed.
Yeah that is something I find funny with these smog laws if I were to swap an LS into 77 trans am that will be getting much better fuel economy and most likely putting out much less emissions that a 400 from that year would have. But I am not allowed to do that due to these types of smog laws because it is not the original equipment the car came with.
Exactly, or even for some of the 70’s era stuff, the emissions systems back then were far far less effective than they are now. If CA allowed people to do it, a modern catalytic converter and a Holley Sniper system and one or two dyno sessions and you can have a car that burns less fuel, makes more power, and outputs significantly less actual emissions across the entire spectrum (CO2, NOx, particulates, etc) for what in many cases would less than the cost of a Montana LLC and fees. It’s genuinely stupid that CA continues to bury their heads in the sand.
Yeah so what happens if you are a mad man EV swap a 70s VW bus onto ID buzz platform some how. Would they say nope sorry even though it is an EV now you removed smog equipment so it is no longer compliant?
I believe EVs have an explicit carve out from smog nowadays.
They do. You can get any classic CARB-compliant by simply converting it to a BEV.
Now I’m not saying that should be done with as mint-condition classic.
But an old worn out heap like David Tracy’s old J10?
Converting that heap to a BEV would be a huge improvement.
A. Fuel economy =/= local emissions. Local emission are based on the quality and maintenance of the emission controls
B. You can do swaps in California including CARB legal crate engines that come with all the required emissions equipment.
JEGS got you covered for a 77 Trans AM
E-ROD Crate Engine & Transmission Package – LS3, 6.2L, 430HP Chevy Performance Crate Engine – JEGS
Not a Californian so that is cool that they allow this.
IIRC, CA is cracking down quite hard on the out of state plates — Montana has seemingly started to close the loophole for most people too.
The Left never misses an opportunity to turn people off, does it?
And I say that as someone who’s left on most issues. The Left in this country will find any way to piss off people who might otherwise be on their side. This seemed like a rather simple, common sense law that probably wouldn’t have had much detrimental effects. I have an old classic car and I put on a few hundred miles a year on it. My classic car insurance limits the miles I put on it, and I don’t want it exposed to the crazies on the road. It’s not hurting anyone. But nope. If I was in CA, people like me would have issues.
For every old classic car that is driven a few hundred miles a year there are ten or twenty 1990 Honda Civics or Ford F150s being daily driven.
Those cars will not last forever, no matter how much fan boys like to pretend otherwise. Wear and tear, rust (yes even in CA), accidents and theft will eventually take all but the cream of the crop. Maybe the rules should stipulate XXXX number of miles maximum per year, or some other rules that makes these limited use vehicles, but simply killing off the proposed law shows how tone-deaf some can be.
Why should people driving old cars get a license to pollute? That is the real question.
Why should a product be expected to pass a rule that it was never designed to pass? It met all safety and pollution rules when it was sold new, right? You are going to magically rewrite history? So should 1930s cars be expected to pass smog rules from the 70s?! How ridiculous is that?
The simple answer is they aren’t.
A 1980 car is expected to pass 1980 rules. A 1990 car is expected to pass 1990 rules, etc, etc.
Only cars built after emission rules were put in effect are required to smog check. That 1930 cars is exempt. As is a 1965 Mustang or anything else older than emission regulations.
But the rules become more strict every few years. A ’90s car won’t pass current limits. It’s not the car nor the owners fault that his ’90s car pollutes more than a current one does. It pollutes as much as it was allowed to pollute when it was sold. Claiming that “they have a license to pollute” is rather BS.
A 1990 car does not have to pass current emission standards. Every car sold since emission standards were created only has to meet the standard when it was sold. Smog checks have different requirements for different car years.
However, if you remove the smog check requirement – that is a license to pollute as much as you want because nobody is going to check. You can drive for years with a failed emission system or simply cut off that catalytic convertor altogether.
A 1990 car owner is required to maintain their car and keep the emission system working to the emission standard when it was sold. That is all.
No current emissions, but standards that are more stringent that when they year they were made.
Believe me, some of those classic cars are in tip-top condition tuned by experts, that can pass the emission test for the year they were built. My car can pass with flying colors the standards shown on the windshield sticker. But it cannot pass the “upgraded” standards even after a tune up.
When I lived in WA state, the emission test would always be amazed how low the emissions where. WA used the same standards as CA, but CA kept tightening the standards. And that is how we end up here.
I have CA smog check paperwork on my car from 2003 to 2025 and the passing standards have not changed.
Do you have paperwork from 70’s and 80’s? They have changed. We are talking pre-OBDII cars.
I don’t, so admittedly I can only definitively say that standards have not changed in the last 22 years.
And to be clear, I’m talking about my 1985 Ford which I have owned since 2001, so I am talking pre-OBDII cars too.
No, the emission rules and testing procedures have been tightened over time. That is why we have this problem.
“I don’t have a car because they pollute”
You don’t own an 89 Civic?
“Oh that car yeah”
It was a Republican governor that overturned the 30 year rolling exemption, not the left.
Do cops do their jobs in LA and larger California cities?
Up here in Seattle, there’s zero police enforcement of anything traffic related, literally. No current tabs? No problem! No plates? No problem! Red lights? Optional, no one will be there to pull you over. It’s literally on the honor system here. Traffic stops here are down something like 90% since 2020.
They do not, NY too.
Traffic laws have been fully optional in Philadelphia since about 2020 when a lot of people said “please stop extrajudicially killing Black people.” The resultant tantrum means no work.
Yup. that’s the reason in Seattle too.
Starting Seattle cop pay is $110k and lots of them make close to $200k with overtime. That is a LOT of tickets that need to be written to cover their cost. So, you need to raise taxes and make people mad or ticket the populace to death and make people mad. It’s a literal lose-lose.
I have a cop friend whose department gets calls complaining about speeders in neighborhoods. So they do an enforcement campaign and then get complaints from the people who originally complained about the speeders because they got caught in the dragnet.
So, what’s covering the cost of their salary now? If zero tickets are being written, wouldn’t that logic suggest that any amount of new tickets written would be a step in the right direction if you were only concerned about the balance sheet of cops salary and revenue produced?
[Which we should absolutely not be concerned about.]
Ticketing offenders of traffic laws is something we need in a society to allow functionality. You can’t have people running afoul of laws strictly because there is no option of ever being caught doing it.
I imagine they are stretched thin by the sheer number of calls. This is just the call log for the Seattle fire department, but you can see they are busy boys and girls.
Seattle Fire Real-Time 911
I’ve been in cars that other people were driving that were pulled over for expired registration tags in Los Angeles (after a certain age, smog testing must be passed to renew registrations here of course). I have no statistically valid data, but anecdotally I’d suggest that traffic-related enforcement is more robust in some parts of LA than it is in others. LA is huge and made up of many varied neighborhoods, and there’s much more proactive law enforcement (of all kinds, including traffic) in Burbank than there is in Hollywood (for example). Personally, I’d not drive my one car with expired tags (it’s currently registered Planned Non-OPeration) even around Hollywood, but maybe I’m just a smidge more law-abiding than some. Also, I prefer not to tempt fate. 😉