If you’ve followed the world of diesel trucks for the past decade, you’re no doubt aware of the drama surrounding aftermarket tuners and defeat devices used to skirt emissions requirements. For years, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice have gone after manufacturers, distributors, and importers of these devices, as well as individuals who use them on their trucks, for violating the Clean Air Act.
Historically, the DoJ has gone after perpetrators by pursuing civil penalties in the form of fines. But in some cases, the agency has also pursued criminal penalties that include higher fines, probation, or actual jail time. The past few years have seen a handful of high-profile cases in which diesel tuners have been sent to prison for designing, installing, or selling defeat devices, in addition to having to pay civil penalties.
That policy is apparently coming to an end. The Department of Justice announced today it plans to stop pursuing criminal charges for these crimes. Here’s what that means.
Civil Charges Over Criminal Charges
The DoJ announced yesterday afternoon on X that it will no longer pursue criminal charges related to the Clean Air Act when the allegations involve tampering with onboard vehicle devices.
Today, @TheJusticeDept is exercising its enforcement discretion to no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices in motor vehicles.
— DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division (@DOJEnvironment) January 21, 2026
In a follow-up post, the DoJ said it was “committed to sound enforcement principles, efficient use of government resources, and avoiding overcriminalization of federal environmental law.” The DoJ also clarified that it would still pursue civil penalties “when appropriate.”
A DoJ memo obtained by CBS News ordered federal prosecutors to stop pursuing criminal cases against those selling, distributing, or manufacturing defeat devices.
The edict, issued by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, marks the first time that the Justice Department has formally taken steps to scale back environmental criminal enforcement since President Trump took office in January 2025.
In the memo, Blanche wrote that he was taking this step “to ensure consistent and fair prosecution under the law, as well as to ensure the best use of Department resources,” according to a copy reviewed by CBS News.
The decision means that violators can no longer be subject to jail time, but it doesn’t mean they’re totally off the hook. The Clean Air Act is still enforceable by the EPA, and civil penalties are still applicable. That means theoretically, Cummins would’ve still had to pay for its near-$1.7-billion civil fine for installing emissions-cheating devices on engines found in Ram 2500 and 3500 pickups.
As for why the DoJ made this change, CBS claims the push was made by a guy named Adam Gustafson, an assistant attorney general appointed in February.
The push to kill all of the pending defeat device cases was championed by Adam Gustafson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division who previously worked for Boeing and at the EPA, according to two of those sources and government records seen by CBS News.
He has not specialized in the practice of criminal environmental law.
Although Gustafson has previously signed off on at least some of the pending indictments involving after-market defeat devices, a new and novel defense bar argument that surfaced over the summer later changed his mind, the sources said.
That argument, according to CBS, came from the owners of Racing Performance Maintenance Northwest, a shop in Washington state. The two owners were convicted last year of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act after pleading guilty to tampering with a monitoring device, and each was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of probation. They later appealed the conviction using a theory that Gustafson posited as worthwhile.
Her attorneys put forth a legal theory alleging that she cannot be held criminally liable because the software associated with emission controls, known as “onboard diagnostic systems,” is not “required to be maintained” under the Clean Air Act.
For this reason, they claimed that such an offense can only be charged as a civil violation, not a criminal one.
Whether you agree with that argument will depend on a lot of things, but for what it’s worth, it sounds like the folks at the EPA have a different opinion. From CBS:
An internal EPA memo reviewed by CBS News shows that career attorneys disagree with the arguments made by defense lawyers in the 9th Circuit case. The memo argues that there are “multiple respects” in which diesel truck emissions software systems are “required to be maintained” under the law, and therefore tampering with them can be a crime.
“When Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, legislators sought to ensure that regulated motor vehicles/engines would meet applicable emission standards not only at the time of manufacture and initial sale, but thereafter in everyday use,” the memo says.
Although the 9th Circuit has not yet ruled on the matter, the legal theory resonated with Gustafson, who started raising questions about the pending cases, one of the sources said.
How The Clean Air Act Has Been Enforced Up Until Now
The Clean Air Act is a wide-ranging law, but in the case of vehicle emissions cheating, it outlaws the manufacturing, selling, or installing of a defeat device, which is “a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device,” according to the EPA. The Act also prohibits anyone “from tampering with an emission control device on a motor vehicle by removing it or making it inoperable prior to or after the sale or delivery to the buyer.” Violators are subject to civil penalties “up to $45,268 per noncompliant vehicle or engine, $4,527 per tampering event or sale of defeat device, and $45,268 per day for reporting and record keeping violations,” according to the EPA.
There have been numerous criminal cases brought by the Justice Department based on the Clean Air Act. The most high-profile case is, of course, Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” scandal, in which researchers discovered the company had installed defeat devices to bypass emissions regulations in secret on around 11 million cars worldwide. More recently, Hino Motors, a subsidiary of Toyota, pleaded guilty in March 2025 to a multi-year emissions fraud scheme involving its diesel engines. No one went to jail, but a judge sentenced Hino to serve five years of probation, where it won’t be able to import diesel engines into the U.S., according to Reuters.
It’s not just OEMs that were subject to criminal prosecution. The DoJ routinely pursued cases of aftermarket defeat device manufacturers, distributors, and installers. In February 2025, an Indiana man was sentenced to four months in prison and given a $25,000 fine after pleading guilty to conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by tampering with monitoring devices on “hundreds” of vehicles, grossing him $4.3 million in earnings from 2019 and 2021, according to the DoJ.
Back in December 2024, Troy Lake Sr., the owner of the Colorado-based Elite Diesel Service Inc., pleaded guilty to disabling onboard diagnostic systems on at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. He was ordered to pay fines totaling $52,200 and sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison. Lake Sr. served seven months in jail before being released to house arrest to serve out the remainder of his sentence, but was pardoned by President Trump in November 2025.
Trump’s pardon of Lake Sr. came at the behest of Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who said in a statement that the case was “yet another example of how federal agencies have been weaponized by Democrat administrations against hardworking Americans.”
This move also follows a year of the administration rolling back environmental protection policies aimed at reducing emissions, most notably starting the process to ease fuel economy requirements for new cars and eliminating fuel economy penalties handed out to automakers over the past three years — with the administration’s stated goal being to reduce vehicle costs to the consumer and to help the auto industry. It’s entirely plausible that this move to end criminal prosecutions for defeat device installers and manufacturers is another step in that direction, rather than purely due to different interpretations of the law.
Why You Should Care
There are two sides to this dispute, both with fairly reasonable arguments. On the one hand, people who own their trucks should be able to modify them how they’d like—it’s their property after all, that they paid for with their own money. What they do with their property shouldn’t be anyone’s business but their own. If they want to add things like wider tires, aftermarket intakes, shorter gearing, or different software after the truck has left the factory, they should be able to. This is, in a nutshell, the thought process the DoJ is using to pivot away from criminal prosecutions with regard to emissions tampering.
On the other hand, diesel trucks with defeat devices can be terrible for the air we breathe. A study released by the EPA in 2020 found that more than 550,000 trucks in the decade leading up to the study had their emissions controls tampered with or removed; the results were not good. From the study:
As a result of this tampering, more than 570,000 tons of excess oxides of nitrogen(NOx) and 5,000 tons of particulate matter (PM) will be emitted by these tampered trucks over the lifetime of the vehicles. These tampered trucks constitute approximately 15 percent of the national population of diesel trucks that were originally certified with emissions controls. But, due to their severe excess NOx emissions, these trucks have an air quality impact equivalent to adding more than 9 million additional (compliant, non- tampered) diesel pickup trucks to our roads.
This is also far worse than anything seen from Volkswagen’s folly, according to the guy in charge of the firm that uncovered the Dieselgate scandal. From The New York Times:
In terms of the pollution impact in the United States, “This is far more alarming and widespread than the Volkswagen scandal,” said Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the research group that first alerted the E.P.A. of the illegal Volkswagen technology. “Because these are trucks, the amount of pollution is far, far higher,” he said.
These emissions have real consequences. Nitrogen dioxide and the 5,000 extra tons of industrial soot emitted by these cheating trucks are linked to lung damage and aggravate existing respiratory diseases such as asthma, according to the EPA. Data released by the agency in October suggests that particulate matter causes 15,000 premature deaths every year.
No matter the underlying reason, going forward, the consequences for tuning your diesel truck to roll coal (as an example — there’s other tuning done for drivability/durability reasons) will be a little less dire. Not that I recommend doing it.
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com, Apple
This will be unpopular, but I’ll say it anyway. Diesel fuel should be restricted to commercial and industrial use only.
Tons of folks actually use their diesel trucks for real work that gassers wouldn’t be able to accomplish.
Yeah, gassers cant roll coal on EVs (I’m being at least semi-sarcastic, I’ve owned a diesel and know there is a need for them in heavy hauling circumstances)
Brother… I own a Miata. I dislike the anti-social coal rollers as much or more than most. I still see the usefulness of a diesel truck.
so do I… I guess you missed the semi sarcastic part.
No but an afterburner can probably meet most ppls’ needs.
Danger zone
“Real work” sounds commercial to me.
A lot of folks in my neck of the woods pulling giant 5th wheel toy haulers and horse trailers. Most are over the weight limit of the gassers.
But then you punish the tradesman by forcing them to pay more by having to buy a commercial plate.
I think HD trucks should just be behind a higher licensing tier. Diesel or not, if your GVWR is above 6000 or your GCWR is above 8000 lbs (random numbers pulled ex recto), you need an additional endorsement on your license to drive it.
For fun, let’s add the lower blood alcohol limit of commercial licenses. If you are pulled over with ANY alcohol in your system, you get a DUI.
This does not prevent any one from owning and driving a Diesel or HD truck but it disincentivizes it from being a daily driver choice and increases the responsibility required of the driver.
Like what?
“…as well as to ensure the best use of Department resources”
True, they need all hands on deck to go after the regime’s political opponents. Doesn’t come cheap, you know.
“both with fairly reasonable arguments. On the one hand, people who own their trucks should be able to modify them how they’d like—it’s their property after all”
No, Brian, not a reasonable argument. You don’t need to take such a wishy-washy both-sides non-stance on this. Bypassing emission controls means other people are forced to breathe the consequences.
Maybe we can compromise here. They can emissions-delete all they want if all the exhaust gets pumped directly into their closed truck cab. Breathe deep, freedom warriors.
You kid but I’ve seen videos of idiots putting their face up to the exhaust and have their buddy rev the engine.
Damn, that’s what I always wanted to forcibly do to them before dumping a gallon on water into the intake.
I am so completely and utterly tired of this morally bankrupt administration. All that has occurred is a complete and total destruction of the moral fabric and social contract, both domestically and abroad. It is the epitome of a zero-sum-game mentality. There is not a shred of nuance to anything this admin does. I am just so deeply saddened by the fact that everyone is convinced someone else has to lose in order to get ahead.
I recognize these diesel emissions systems are pretty miserable from an ownership perspective, but saying that it’s entirely fine to just chop it all off and raise a middle finger does nothing. There is zero incitive to any manufacturer to improve them, only make them more fragile and cheaper to produce because nobody will bother keeping them anyways.
Everything is in shambles, I’m exhausted, and I just want things to go back to normal, but here we are.
OR dump R&D into making them as easy as possible to remove.
“I recognize these diesel emissions systems are pretty miserable from an ownership perspective”
Are they, though? My understanding is that most diesel emissions systems tend to last 200k-300k miles on average. They are expensive when they fail, but realistically, any failure on a modern diesel isn’t cheap (hell, an oil change on my diesel F250 is $200… nothing about a diesel truck is cheap). The failure rate of these systems seems to be exaggerated by people who want an excuse to modify their trucks for performance or to roll coal. Some people complain about having to ad DEF, but that isn’t a big deal since a lot of truck stops and large gas stations have it at the pump anyway. Plus, DEF tanks only have to be refilled every 5k – 8k miles or so.
(I’m not disagreeing with anything else in your comment – I just wanted to point out that the hassle/expense of diesel emissions equipment is often greatly overstated)
I agree. I’d rather the Netherlands take over the US than the US take over Greenland.
The whole argument about there not being a requirement to maintain emissions equipment sounds like the argument people use to not pay their federal income taxes. Those people argue that there isn’t anything in the law requiring them to pay, therefore income taxes are voluntary. Just ask Wesley Snipes about how that defense worked out for him.
I sooo look forward to breathing air I can see with the naked eye. That’s the best sort of air, right?
Lunatics are definitely running the asylum. Sigh.
Thankfully, I have every confidence that the adults will take over again, if not completely next year, then in 2029.
The 70’s were awesome! Hopefully they’ll bring back leaded gas too. (Sarcasm)
Don’t give them ideas!
Dear God, RFK will conclude that Autism was lower in the 70’s and that leaded gas is necessary to reduce Autism rates. Can’t be any worse than claiming Tylenol causes Autism.
I hate this timeline. 1093 days to go. If I don’t make it, go on without me.
My bet is Dear Leader doesn’t make it.
Air pollution is made up by liberal crybabies! I breathed in some diesel smoke and I didn’t immediately get cancer or die, so it’s all fake news!
I am going to go home today, go to my barn with all the doors and windows closed and start my 12v Cummins, 79 Formula, 89 Formula and my FJ and I bet my barn cats and I would be fine breathing in all that sweet sweet exhaust. /s Hell even with the door open my 89s exhaust after sitting for a bit is way to rich and will burn my eyes hah.
Shit man, I’ve had cars with catalytic converters that ran too rich when it’s cold and made you light headed if the breeze blew the exhaust in the window. At least if you go back older than that it’s just raw gasoline
Lol you show ’em boss.
Yeah I work with some heavy equipment pretty regularly since my job is essentially in transportation. Running a semi tractor in a large, unconditioned building that supposedly is ultra-low emitting, and you smell it. And you know it’s bad for you, but as soon as the bay door opens and that wind whips in and it’s freezing out, you’re almost fine with it.
Yeah going to be below 0s by me tomorrow and I think I would rather be in a building with one of our shitty trucks running vs outside flashing the stupid thing where my laptop starts to freeze because it is so cold and I cannot use the touch pad because my finger tips are frozen.
Jeez fine, you win! That’s honestly way worse than what I deal with haha. My sympathies for sure, no one wants to be doing this shit but someone has to. I’m the engineer, and since it’s gov’t contracting I will get in serious trouble if I so much as touch a tool. So I get to feel like an idiot standing there and watching the guys do the actual work.
Haha I am still titled as a technician but I am currently training 2 senior engineers to do the same work that I do. I originally applied for their positions but was told they were for external only and I was told I would be bumped to a level higher then them but that change to nevermind we cannot have you skip a level but you might get bumped to that same position those new guys started at….so yeah yay I am a technician but treated like I am higher then a senior engineer but get paid as a tech.
Can you use those gloves with the capacitive finger tips that work with phones? They also have handheld mice that use a trackball.
https://www.newegg.com/p/32K-0185-00406?item=9SIAFJTKJX1493
Funny thing is at home and work I use a normal track ball mouse. Also hard to type on the type of laptop I use for work with gloves would be constantly fat fingering the key board hah.
Meh, I just stood on Woodward Ave and breathed deep every time a DOT bus went by.
I’m glad I don’t have kids, so I don’t have to explain to them that we knew diesel exhaust was carcinogenic, but we didn’t do anything about it because controlling emissions makes grown men sad and electric school buses give you autism or something.
Diesel fumes is good for your immune system! Didn’t you see RFK Jr’s new upside-down nutritional guide?
I am incredibly split on this…
As a right wing conservative, I definitely buy into the “it’s your car/truck, modify it as you like”. Modern diesel emissions systems are designed to work only when a truck is pulling big weight for long distances. Otherwise, they clog and break (at great expense).
On the other hand… I was also for a short time, a truck mechanic. I could 100% tell the difference between the big trucks that had modern emissions equipment and those that didn’t by how my workshop smelled after pulling them in and out. The fumes were obnoxious. Also, people who tune their trucks to purposefully roll coal are douches. Even 90’s diesel trucks (pre-emissions) are awful to drive behind, so basic catalysts are probably a good thing.
I truly believe there should be a middle ground. Gale Banks has proven that you can tune a diesel for power without rolling coal. The problem with the middle ground is that neither side of the political aisle is interested in working towards this.
Agreed it is a iffy topic. A better solution would have been more investments into bio-diesels and cleaner fuels to burn but alas it all comes down to cost. And yeah I get a lot of angry people and get flipped of often when I am driving my first Gen Cummins since it has no emissions equipment and belches some when I get going from a light also does not help it is a manual I try my best not to blow smoke at peeps especially when it is nice out and windows are down.
You probably get mistaken for someone who did an intentional delete. Sorry you have to deal with that.
Yeah don’t think most people understand old diesels all that well haha
My problem with aftermarket tuners like Banks are that they don’t tune or care for emissions. There aren’t any studies I am aware of that show the actual emissions outputs from these tuned trucks, but there is a very real reason that trucks have the restrictive equipment they have based on what emissions regulations are in place.
The argument I hear often online (not that I attribute this to you, just an example) is that “Well I tuned it to be more fuel efficient which means it’s better for the environment.” This sounds great on it’s face, but is absolutely almost never true. Burning less fuel will generally release a lesser total mass of emissions into the atmosphere, but the makeup of those emissions are incredibly important. Diesel combustion inherently creates very large volumes of NOx emissions, or oxides of nitrogen, have a nearly 300 times greater impact on climate change as a greenhouse gas than CO2 does. This is the same reason gasoline powered cars do not run a lean combustion regime, yes, it does in fact burn less fuel, but it creates more harmful emissions profiles due to the higher temperatures created by a 16 or 20:1 combustion, rather than stoichiometric which is 14.7:1 for gasoline.
In fact, rolling coal is an inherently garbage way to tune an engine. The fuel and air profile of rolling coal is terrible for both power and efficiency, but is rather a desired outcome by most tunes for the smoke. The same can be said for most production cars and gas engines. Aftermarket tunes can make plenty more power than stock, often reliably too, but they are inherently compromising on something, almost always on emissions profiles, because the aftermarket tunes are not enforced the same way that OEMs are.
That is Bank’s platform: rolling coal is a terrible tune. He is still in business due to most of his tunes and parts being CARB legal.
This is a refreshingly reasonable take.
If this administration was a car, it would be the Hoffman.
Every choice they make (design or otherwise) is WRONG.
I’d argue that the current administration is a Chevy Suburban. Loud, brash, family friendly, not entirely interested in the environment, but unashamedly American.
Family-friendly for an extremely narrow definition of family, maybe.
Welp, one side wants people to have kids, and the other side roots for killing them before they’re born.
The Republicans root for letting them die or be disabled by easily prevented communicable disease.
“The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel charted a new course for the committee in a podcast released Thursday, suggesting the public might want to reconsider the use of polio vaccines. “
At the same time they’re rolling back things like accessibility accommodations.
wow, way to oversimplify.
From an earlier comment of yours:
Apparently a woman making decisions about her own body is too much freedom.
Comparing car ownership to actual murder is wild.
It’s comparing freedom. You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of freedom you like. You like freedom, or you like others telling you how to live your life, whether that is about car ownership, medical decisions, religion, education, speech, etc. Freedom also means accepting that some people may do things you don’t like, that is their freedom.
I’m glad you’ve never been in a position to have to think about abortion as an option. I can tell you haven’t because of your use of the word ‘murder’.
I hope you and your loved ones never are in that position, but wish you could consider the perspective of others who may be thinking of it due to pregnancy from rape, spreading of congenital conditions, having life-threatening complications from pregnancy (mother and/or child), or simply recognizing that they are not currently fit to be a parent.
Yes, I recognize that adoption is an option for some of these scenarios, but our adoption system is also broken, which nobody ever talks about. It is crazy to me that to qualify for adoption you must be absolutely perfect and financially secure, but an alcoholic mother living in poverty can have a child and take it home without question. Quite the disconnect.
I 100% agree that adoption needs to be easier and MUCH cheaper. The fact that it often costs 40K out of pocket to give a kid a better life is asinine (my friends just paid off their son, as wild as that sounds).
I am on the other side of things… I desperately want more kids. My wife and I have really struggled with infertility and miscarriage, but luckily we were able to get pregnant with a second kiddo (took quite a few years). It’s such a slap in the face to see people easily conceive and then purposefully end the life of children who’s only wrong was the inconvenience/trauma of being created.
Plenty of my loved ones (including my mother-in-law) have been in the position of an unwanted pregnancy. My MIL made the right choice and gave my sister-in-law up for adoption. Luckily, it was an open adoption, so that we still have a relationship with her.
At the end of the day, why shouldn’t the child have the freedom to live?
If they can’t afford the $40k, how are they going to afford to raise a kid? If that number is accurate, it has gotten much cheaper as my aunt and uncle had to pay more than that in the ’80s. Of course, easier adoptions would also make trafficking even easier than it is and ah, never mind.
I think it’s honestly a really tough discussion to find common ground about until people can agree whether or not it is, as you said, “a woman making decisions about her own body.” If it is her own body, there absolutely should be freedom. If it is someone else’s body, then it does become murder.
I don’t think any other question is really relevant, because if you answer the question one way, you’ll be able to argue from human freedom, while if you answer it the other way, you’ll be able to argue from the value of human life.
The tricky part is that both life and freedom are super high-level tenets of our society, and I don’t think other arguments can really overcome these base-level principles, if we can’t agree on whether it is her body or not.
Tell that to the 200,000 people murdered each year by pollution in the US.
https://lae.mit.edu/2024/06/28/air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-u-s/
Oh, is “early death” not “murder”? Well then abortion is an “early death”.
I’ve never met anyone who “roots” for abortion. Pro-choice is not pro-abortion, it’s anti-forced birth.
I have met folks who do root for abortion. Incredibly heartbreaking.
How exactly are they “rooting” for abortion?
Literal conversation with my roommate (at the time’s) family friend: “I love abortion. I’d have one every week if I could”. At this point, for probably the second time in my life, I was genuinely speechless for the lack of humanity.
That’s not rooting for abortion.
I think they were fucking with you, sir.
That’s something we like to call “sarcasm”.
He’s trolling you because he realized you are probably pro-birth as opposed to pro-life. (probirth being anti-abortion and that’s about it, but pro-life being someone who actually cares about living people such as born children and their continued welfare including funding for that, healthcare for everybody, against school shootings and willing to regulate guns to achieve that goal and fund mental health programs for those that need it etc…). Most Republican politicians tend to fall into the “pro-birth” category and could not care less about anyone living beyond popping out of the womb even though they call themselves pro-life. That’s a different and more relevant version of the “lack of humanity” that you cited in regard to your family friend.
It was wild, as it was a she who said it. Also, she had no clue of my political beliefs and my roommates at the time were very liberal. I didn’t bring it up.
I’ll bite. Wanting people to have kids isn’t equivalent to being family friendly. Cutts to SNAP, WIC (this one stands for Women Infants and Children, so good one there), healthcare cuts, restrictions to medical assistance in the guise of shutting down abortion, reduced education funding, what else? Oh yeah the antivax crusade, like the South Carolina measles outbreak. Boy that sure sounds family friendly to me.
Hey, people need to have kids so that ICE can grab them and use them as bait in order to abduct their parents, who have an active asylum case.
ICE detains 5-year-old Minnesota boy; lawyer says agents used him as ‘bait’ | MPR News
Except for making an environment that is conducive to having them, instead they hand everything over to the billionaires who pull their strings, making everything more expensive while wages are stagnated and they rush to replace us with shitty technology. Clean environment? Education? Health care? Nope. Tear families apart? Yup, we’ll do that! But it’s not hypocritical as many libs might point out, it’s all part of the plan—kids born into difficult and dysfunctional circumstances are more likely to be trafficked and that’s what they’re about. Every aborted kid is a lost potential dancing boy for the American Taliban.
The number one cause of death for children in the US is firearms. If one side wants kids alive so much, why don’t they do something about that?
Or about making sure they are vaccinated from preventable diseases such as measles and polio?
Or not deporting kids to a country of which they have no knowledge?
Or not attempting to take away SNAP from families?
Or not attempting to take away healthcare from families?
Or not reversing environmental regulations which would have made the world the kids grew up in a more hospitable place?
Or not slashing education funding from public schools?
The “but won’t someone please think of the (unborn) children” argument under the guise of pro-life is a fallacy.
I think “family-friendly” might just about one family in particular.
You know, like when you give the son-in-law a cushy job because he’s related?
Ugh I hate that I’m taking the bait, but it’s not even friendly for a narrow definition of family. We make it excessively hard on all families. Having kids is hard, but the US government (over many administrations) really has a “fuck you, you wanted these kids, you figure it out” attitude about it.
Once they made it necessary for 2 incomes to run most households, the nuclear family died. Dang shame.
No no, the definition is just even narrower than that; it has the precursor of rich. If you’re rich, then they’re friendly towards your family.
“family friendly”
Unless you’re a 5 year old boy being abducted by ICE.
Is it more humane to separate the kids from their parents for when the parents get deported?
Why wouldn’t you keep the kid with the parents when you deport them? It’s monstrous to do anything else.
My (American citizen, because it needs to be said apparently) spouse is afraid to leave the house because the American government is kidnapping people off the street. Bro, your team literally executed a lady in Minneapolis for exercising her supposedly constitutionally protected right to photograph public servants her tax money pays for, and the administration was like “yeah and we’d do it again”
You guys are so far in the wrong at this point I have no clue how you continue justifying this.
No disrespect, but the TDS is strong with your spouse, good sir. Perhaps it would be good for the mental health to turn off the news for a bit.
ICE is no knock grabbing people *in our neighborhood* and they’re not background checking new hires. I don’t live in a white community, I live in a Latino neighborhood and we already have already seen them grabbing US citizens.
It’s not on us to give you the benefit of the doubt, it’s on *you* to not say shit like “we’re giving ICE unqualified immunity and will not be investigating any reports of malfeasance *at all*”
You guys are uninterested in governing, uninterested in coexisting with people who don’t believe the same things you do, and awfully cavalier about the lives of humans who have already been born.
I wish these pansies would just embrace that they’re the villain so I could have a modicum of respect for them.
ICE grabbed a 5-year-old from daycare because they wanted to use him as bait to get his dad. I don’t call that “family-friendly.”
The real story is that the dad ditched the kid to run from ICE. They didn’t want the kid to freeze to death.
ICE lies constantly. If you believe them you’re a sucker.
The thing I always wonder about with emissions is how population density affects it. I think it’s pretty well-established that LA did (does?) have air pollution problems caused by vehicle emissions, thanks to a combination of geography and large numbers of drivers.
However, I have to imagine that the majority of deleted diesels are driving around in much more rural areas, where the number of drivers per mile is way lower, and their emissions are unlikely to ever reach a dangerous concentration. Sure it can’t be good for the global atmosphere, but if the effects are spread out enough, it probably wouldn’t become noticeable for a very, very long time.
Is that logic valid? I can’t say I’ve studied this kind of thing, but it makes sense to me
All that Diesel-related particulate added to the atmosphere is really bad, period. I guess if there aren’t as many people living near these trucks, the number of added asthma cases will be low, sure. It still all adds up no matter where the pollution is occurring.
The coal-rolling assholes of my region love to come into town, and coal-roal pedestrians of all ages. So as much as these diesels may have a permanent address outside of town, they don’t tend to stay there.
It sucks especially bad now in winter, where exhaust tends to hang around low to the ground. #1 douche being the guy who basically blankets the entire elementary school drop off area with smog every morning.
Hmm, my initial comment was considering two cases:
You’re adding a third case:
3. Street scale
So the world scale has really bad consequences, but also a really long timeline before they would be problematic. The city scale may depend on whether or not it is, in fact, a city. The street scale has short but intense effects.
The little kid coughs make me feel like I’m watching a production of Oliver Twist at 8:30am.
I’m certainly not a fan of the macro effects of soot belching diesels, but the worst offenders who actively flip off whatever community they happen to be in pisses me off the most.
Fair point! Growing up in rural Canada, I’ve seen a fair number of guys rolling coal, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it being done specifically antisocially (targeting pedestrians, etc.) Maybe Canadians just have higher standards for politeness with that, or I was just luckier in my specific location. My experience would make me feel like “irresponsible, but whatever, doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone short-term.” Your experience seems a lot more legitimately problematic
We as a nation could use a serious attitude adjustment.
Terrance and Phillip for President works for me.
He’s for sure a douche. And: that was my experience every day when the school bus drove by.
I’m not sure I have a point other than I’m glad at least those days seem to be over
The problem with this has been inconsistent application of the law.
Diesel guys were the most visible, both in advertising and in literal black smoke on the road, but an awful lot of “tuners” are out there selling non-emissions-compliant tunes, catless pipes, etc for performance cars and basically getting away with it. And the truth for many enthusiasts is that one of these is more acceptable than the other. “Rolling coal” is distasteful and gross, but in terms of actual harm, is an open-header Mustang or Corvette actually any better?
Yes, of course.
Yes.
Unrestricted diesel exhaust tuned for rolling coal is far far more harmful.
Let me phrase another way then.
Is the harm differential so great as to justify not enforcing emissions law against non-diesel offenders?
Don’t make a strawman here.
On a scale of bad to worse, one is clearly worse.
So without unlimited resources at hand: focus on the worse.
But, alas, we’re in an environment where the teeth are being actively removed from the EPA. So, no one is surprised here.
My point in highlighting this is that the outcry from commenters here is a bit hypocritical considering I’d venture to guess more than a few have utilized tuning services that are not exactly compliant with the law.
My strong suspicion is that diesel truck owners are generally considered an unsympathetic “other” and therefore there’s no issue with the law coming down hard on them (or anger when the opposite occurs, as here). If the news was that the full force of the law was going to be enforced on muscle car and sport compact tuners as opposed to diesel truck guys, I doubt the reaction in the comments would be so positive.
For the vast majority, there’s a significant difference in actions and intent by owners.
There’s much schadenfreude, and deservedly so, when diesel owners claim victim.
But, there’s also the same schadenfreude when a vehicle with open pipes is pulled over and cited by local PD for noise violations.
I think EPA went after the low hanging fruit: the diesel guys who were loudly flaunting the law and making big $ doing it. It would hard to justify NOT going after them.
EPA has done other enforcement.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-cracks-down-companies-california-new-jersey-oregon-and-washington-state-selling
The descriptions are vague so you’d have to look up the cases for specifics. At least one talks about selling catless exhaust systems.
I think motive plays into it: at least for performance tuners environmental destruction isn’t the stated goal.
And, also, scale matters here. Realistically, how many people are deleting emissions equipment from their cars? Diesels is a different animal, due in part to the legitimate tradeoffs with modern emissions equipment and this toxic culture of celebrating bad choices.
Uh, non-diesel offenders were being punished too. My former employee was fined for selling tuners for gasoline powered cars.
Hotter combustion = less soot = lots more NOx (though I suspect these coal rolling tunes just have horrible mixing and combustion effienciency to get the worst of both worlds with high NOx and lots of PM). Depends on pollutants, but you’re absolutely right, all these “tuned” gas cars may be just as problematic if they’ve removed their cats and running crappy tunes. Again really depends which pollutants you’re concerned about, and you’d have to test it to know for sure.
Maybe if autopian gets 10,000 new subscribers this month they can fund a round of emissions testing!
The only thing I can say with tuned gas cars or cars with emission equipment removed they might not be getting driven as much (like my firebird then again 89 emissions equipment wasn’t the greatest as is and my engine isn’t the original anymore anyways haha) as a guy in a bro-dozer that is just blowing smoke for blowing smokes sake.
Yeah for these cars that are mainly only driven for fun I’m less inclined to be pedantic about the added emissions.
Intent and usage have colored my opinion more, and if I’m out riding my bike on the road, the driver in the tuned muscle car passing me is probably not actively trying to fill my lungs with carcinogens. The truck that suddenly belches the smoke monster from Lost on the other hand…
This is a good point. They’re both bad, different types of bad, all worthy of enforcement. But visibility between the two is very different.
They should all be heavily prosecuted.
People who have deleted the catalytic convertor from their cars should absolutely be punished. Even the difference in exhaust fumes from a 15yo car to a new one is amazing, let alone something without even a 200 cell cat.
There is no reason (beyond theft) that someone should remove the cat on a road car.
This argument is nonsense. If a vehicle is used on public roads there are many modifications that absolutely should not be allowed, regardless of what the truck owner thinks.
Are you saying that I shouldn’t be allowed to modify my minivan Mad Max style with a spiked cow catcher on the front and flames shooting out of the back?! Why do you hate freedom so much???
Naw all that is fine.
This is the legal equivalent of “A Husband and a Wife cannot be charged for the same crime”, somehow being successful in federal court.
What they do with their property shouldn’t be anyone’s business but their own. If they want to add things like wider tires, aftermarket intakes, shorter gearing, or different software after the truck has left the factory, they should be able to.
This statement only has merit when what you want to do does not unduly affect someone else. And spewing pollution into the air and making the air worse for everyone else is the very definition of affecting someone else. This is no different fundamentally than smoking cigarettes indoors and making your habit everyone else’s problem.
Why do I have a feeling antismoking restrictions will be next to go?
Dunno, I’m too busy fighting the War on Protein!
One of my department’s buildings hasn’t been significantly updated since the 1970s which means we’ve still got these built into the walls on every floor in the event of just such an occurrence:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52648986666_1fcd3bcf76_c.jpg
These days, however, the students (and increasingly the staff and faculty) don’t quite know what they are.
This reminds me of when I lived in an old apartment unit and the medicine cabinet had a slot for your used safety razor blades to be disposed of in
I’ve seen some renovations videos that show the pile of blades in the walls. I get that it would take a few centuries for that to cause issues, but it still seems so wild to think of throwing away trash INTO your house. While you’re at it, why not floss, q-tips, condom wrappers…
I only knew what that slot was because I actually use an old-fashioned safety razor. And yes, I tossed my used blades in that slot while I lived there. Maybe not the best thing I’ve done. Now I live in a more modern building, and recycle my used blades by putting them in empty beer/soda cans so they don’t accidentally harm anyone
Thankfully that is primarily at the state level, other than things like airlines. But there is zero chance US airlines will ever allow smoking again. They save a fortune in cleaning costs, though IIRC the nicotine stains made it easy to find minor cabin leaks. <eek>
You could always easily spot the outflow valves on airplanes back in the day by the nasty brown streak trailing out of them…
#makeflyinggreatagain /s
They’re already trying to enforce dress codes.
Maybe a little give and take here? Like, we won’t wear pajamas to the airport if you promise we won’t get stuck there for 6 hours without compensation and forced to eat $22 burgers?
Thank goodness for competent and rational state legislators!
Mostly. Definitely not a universal thing. Florida… Sigh.
Many years ago when I was still flying DC-9’s for a living we had all kinds of outflow valve problems due to smokers .The “sugar scoop “ valve was always gumming up,at our airlines it was a daily maintenance check item .
Did you happen to fly for Northwest? I logged soooo many miles in their DC-9s in the 90’s-early ’00s. Miss both the airline and the airplanes.
I completely agree – modifying your truck to make it unsafe to others around you is serfish and childish. But the basis for this issue takes this a step further.
It’s not you modifying your truck (smoking indoors), which may be legal and certainly won’t get you in trouble. We’re talking about companies setting up inside of schools and selling cigarettes directly to students and making millions off of it.
It’s one thing if I put a tune on my engine that *may not* be 50 state legal or is “off-road only”. It’s another if I’m selling those tunes to people in states that they are explicitly illegal or even installing them myself on cars driven on the street. It’s just straight up criminal behavior.
So, which of the companies made “donations” to get rid of the charges?
The guys who got multi-million dollar fines tossed Trump $500k. His usual fee is $2M, but there’s a discount when you get to own the libs.
Esp if you invest it in TRUMPcoin or whatever is hot these days
So, a person who owns a vehicle ought to be able to load it up to triple its max weight? I cannot put into words how much I hate this logic.
As soon as your “mod” has a negative health and safety effect on the rest of us, its the government’s right to restrict it.
The other day my wife was complaining about the four 737 landing lights I installed to replace my sealed beam headlights. I’m like “But how else can I see out of my 5% limo tinted windshield at night?” By the way, my new spiked front-mounted cow catcher really does help keep children and pets off the hood! I got the non-stick model that makes cleanup a breeze!
Only going after them civilly? So they’re sending thousands of law enforcement onto American streets, building tent cities to house anyone accused of violations, beating and tear gassing protestors, and shooting any drivers who come near them?
Sorry, immigration is a field I work in, so the hypocrisy hits a little close to home.
Thank you for your work and it is just bats**t in the Twin Cities right now.
There aren’t two sides to this argument, and people should not be able to modify their vehicles however they’d like.
I don’t like seatbelts, so I’ll remove them. Ditto for the air bags. Also, I want super bright headlights – you all just have to deal with it. And let’s bring back the Carolina Squat while we’re at it.
As the parent of a kid with asthma, all I can say this is stupid. Really, really stupid.
Or no headlights, “big gov cant’t tell me to drive with headlights and tailights. what about my rights.” snark and supporting what you are saying.
Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to let the emissions-delete crowd also remove their seatbelts and airbags.
…and steering wheels.
Years ago, a buddy of mine had a CJ-7 with a loose steering wheel nut. We were out cruising the loop one summer evening, top and doors off. He thought it would be a good idea to remove the steering wheel and steer using a vice grip.
After a loop or two, a cop saw us and apparently took issue. Fortunately he had to wait for traffic before tearing after us, and we were able to duck onto a side street and lose him before he could track us down.
Fun memories, and one of those things my adult kids still don’t know about.
I have no doubt that’s already happening. That’ll really #ownthelibs
Seriously though I remember reading Tucker Carlson actually did remove the airbags from his car
While he was in it, his car still had one.
I see what you did there.
I enjoy that comment. Good work!
There’s obviously a lot to be mad about on this topic, but as I mentioned in another comment it’s not even about you removing your seatbelts. The basis for these lawsuits that are getting tossed is that businesses were getting paid by people to knowingly and intentionally do illegal modifications to these cars.
If you take the seatbelt out of your car you’ll get a ticket and a slap-on-the-wrist small fine.
If I make a business out of taking seatbelts out of people cars and make millions of dollars doing it, all good.
See what you want to do is install an aftermarket seatbelt that LOOKS totally legit but is guaranteed to fail in a crash. Make sure you only buy from reputable outfitters who will share their testing data with you.
There are numerous stories out there of salvage title cars with fake/cheap aftermarket air bags that either didn’t go off or exploded & threw shrapnel when the next big accident came, resulting in deaths.
But hey the car looked nice when they bought it.
Years ago, catalytic converters were prone to plugging and it was very common as cars aged for them to be removed or hollowed out. It fixed the problem, but made those cars less environmentally friendly.
Cat deletes were also common for performance reasons due to the restrictive nature of the early ones. Modern cats though last longer and have such minimal restriction that just deleting the cat will rarely provide any meaningful performance improvement. As such, it’s much less common for cars that were originally equipped with cats to be driving around in it still in their old age.
I see modern diesels as being similar to the early smog choked gas engines. There are many people doing deletes now just to make their vehicles more reliable and fuel efficient. As diesel technology continues to evolve I hope it ends up the same as gas engines and their smog equipment, effectively less complex/restrictive and more likely to be kept on the vehicle.
Coal rolling is a different animal however, and an unfortunate side effect of the flexibility the tuning necessary for a delete can offer. I know multiple people with deleted trucks who burn clean, but it would have been just as easy to be a “cool” kid when they did the work.
The problem is “common knowledge” sticks around a few decades after the issue goes away. If all the issues with diesel engine emissions equipment went away today, people would still be doing deletes on new trucks 20 yrs from now, convinced it’s increasing performance (or whatever), egged on by the aftermarket manufacturers happy to propagate the myth.
Right, the solution to “we can’t make a reliable diesel engine that meets emissions” isn’t “delete the things that make it meet emissions”. It’s “don’t sell diesel engines, period”
Yeah. At least around here, you absolutely still see people selling fairly new gassers with emissions delete as a selling point. And there’s no way around it–people will just believe anyone telling them the truth is trying to sell them on “environmentalism” or “woke.”
If the only penalty is a fine, the law only applies to the poor.
If all of the teeth are getting pulled from the EPA, then the game is over and we (or rather our kids) have lost. May as well bring back the leaded gas.
Clean, powerful, American lead.
That’ll show those EVs.
Unsealed lead acid batteries! Create thousands of new jobs in the exciting emerging field of acid replenishment!
Uncharacteristically, I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a greenie leftist, who’s old and remembers smog alerts, lung-burning LA smog and rows of smoke-belching semis trundling up the Grapevine. I’ve always vociferously supported smog laws even when they’ve made my life a living hell, trying to get old crappy cars to pass the sniffer tests.
But holy tapdancing Christ, the pollution controls on modern diesels are terrible, they’re legendarily unreliable, incredibly expensive and render huge vehicles useless when dropping into “limp mode”. My employer has spent tens of thousands of dollars just on towing when medium-duty diesel trucks derate themselves to a point where they can’t even be driven to a dealership. Between the problematic DEF systems, plugged-up aftertreatment filters and clogged/cracked EGR setups, it’s a never-ending cavalcade of misery that not only costs a shit-ton on money, but the downtime is horrible.
Until these systems improve in reliability, I have a hard time condemning owners that remove the systems in the name of reliability, but the coal-rollers can piss right off. It’s a non-issue in California anyway, as you have to smog diesels now, even large Class 7 and Class 8 trucks, the new Cleancheck regulations have gone into effect.
The systems are overly complex, fiddly and prone to failure because they are trying to achieve a very difficult task – make diesel not belch NOx. They are the ptolemaic model of emissions, strapping on more and more complexity rather than face the truth.
Yeah, and NOx solutions like EGR that work pretty well in gasoline vehicles are problematic in diesels because the particulates are constantly plugging every exhaust passage everywhere.
I off road with guys that tell me the air and smog in LA is worse now then ever in history (the live in mn by the way) and that it is because of environmental regulations ( you know how they vote)
I’m always amazed at the number of “experts” about a geographical area that they don’t live in and in most cases haven’t ever visited. I’ve lived here my entire life and the difference in air quality between 1975 and 2025 is nothing short of a technological miracle, especially considering the massive increase in population.
Here’s the problem. You don’t see too many of the lived-through-polio crowd sympathetic to the antivax movement. As fewer and fewer people are able to remember 1970’s LA smog, there will be less support to prevent its return. It’s like every generation needs to (re)learn the hard way…
another example would be WW2 and the Holocaust.
Jack Smith said today in Congress that we’ve gotten too used to the rule of law and started to think it’s self-executing…
If they had observational skills, they could literally see it in old TV shows and movies.
I’ve heard they’ve gotten more reliable since the first systems hit the market? Any truth to that? And I can accept “more reliable” might still not be “reliable enough.” Ppl have a right to make a living . It’s one thing if you don’t want to fill up a DEF tank, but if your vehicle is regularly unusable, yeah that’s a problem you should not have to deal with.
There’s a “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” argument to be made here, but I want to point out that no one has the right to make a living in violation of the law. We’ve gradually added regulation to limit the harm of commerce, and while that has had adverse effects on certain jobs and industries, that’s often not a good enough reason to suspend the rule. It’s unfortunate that sometimes the government is “picking winners and losers” but when done right the outcome is an overall societal benefit. I would argue that the Clean Air Act is one of the clearest cut examples of success, considering how few of us deal with smog these days.
Yeah I didn’t mean to be so broad. I was thinking of the person whose truck is in the shop multiple times a year bc it keeps going into limp mode. There are some vocations where diesel is still the only option. I can’t blame them for deleting the system after a certain point, especially if they were maintaining everything properly and it was still unreliable
“ There are some vocations where diesel is still the only option”
Fine, but for every one of those, there are 100 others who could get by just fine with a regular gas truck – they just choose not to. I have trouble having sympathy for someone who bought a diesel truck but doesn’t have the constitution to do the upkeep that makes it palatable for the rest of us.
Ditto. My comment is based on the assumption that these systems can still leave you stranded even if you do everything right.
It’s hard to see any improvement because the systems have been progressively getting more complicated as time goes on. The earliest systems were just EGR, then traps/regeneration in I think 2008, then they added the DEF systems a few years later.
I know our in about 2021 our IH garbage trucks and dump trucks had the whole DEF system temporarily deleted by the IH dealer(with the approval of the EPA, I assume) for about 18 months while they tried to reengineer a working solution, we had to bring them back to the dealership to have them turned back on and some parts replaced. This was on a Cummins L-series motor.
And when the parts break new parts need to be produced so more emissions are put off producing said parts. Also more plastic into landfills from parts thrown into the trash and also all the bottles DEF comes in yay. Oh and also now you need to transport DEF to fuel stations so you need trucks transporting said DEF. Also Cummins, VW and International have all been caught cheating on diesel emissions so how much are these systems so how much were these systems actually helping when they were cheating? Did these companies just find ways to fudge the numbers again and have not been caught yet? I always feel like a lot of the helping the environment situation is a bunch of lies because money talks.
Life is messy. Say what you will about EPA, they know how to do a few thousand page cost benefit analysis. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that the improvement in air quality outweighs the additional plastic and transport needs. But they probably assumed more reliable systems than the ones we ended up with…
The emissions controls, when working, do reduce NOx and particulates an enormous amount, just watch the stacks of a fully loaded semi accelerating up a hill, there’s virtually no visible smoke. 30 years ago, they were all rolling coal. According to the sniffer, NOx is similarly reduced.
The technology works…until it doesn’t.
Yes so true they are working much better you look at modern semi and correct they are not blowing smoke like trucks from 20+ years ago. But to me the systems have been unreliable though they have been getting better at least from where I work the newer system seems better then the older ones but this system has only been on the market for like 2 or 3 years now so only time will tell.
Right. And these engines remain in service for a loooooong time so it’ll be a while before the “fleet” catches up with the current tech
Yup and I work in the industry and the US truck sales have been down bad. So you will see the older trucks on the road even longer.
I generally agree with the reliability of the early DEF systems being poor. Some of that unreliability was due to user error. Old diesels before DPFs could idle for hours without any ill effects. Once DPFs were added, prolonged idling would start to clog the filter. I think the owners and drivers of the DPF equipped trucks weren’t informed or trained well enough to avoid prolonged idle hours.
Yeah, the biggest issues I(and my techs) see is on vehicles that are driven lightly and infrequently with a lot of idle time. The vehicles that are constantly being beaten to within an inch of their rattling lives seem to have the fewest issues.
Unfortunately, heavy equipment ends up being used as needed – for example the trash trucks run a PTO at a fast idle for hours every day and there’s not much you can do about it.
We’re running into a similar issue. We have a large vehicle with a big ol’ Scania DC13 in it, and it does NOT get used often enough. We’ve already went through multiple DEF dosing valves (at $2k a pop) because they crystalize up and can only be cleaned so many times.
At least the Scania somehow makes due without a DPF, so one less worry. But there are still plenty of problems with an infrequently-run industrial diesel engine made to run like 24/7.
Sounds like you need an Italian tune-up on your Swedish engine.
You’re not going to believe this, but the vehicle itself IS built by an Italian company! Specifically these guys: https://www.cometto.com/
Not their fault we don’t run it, but the engine is too “smart” to trick into a tune-up like that. It’ll just go into limp mode and you’re SOL.
Frankly I won’t buy a new diesel due to how unreliable the emissions systems are. Now Gas cars are getting particulate filters as well, next think you know you’ll have to fill them up with urea too.
I love BEVs and I don’t want to own another ICE vehicle for the rest of my life, but there are not enough BEVs to do the jobs people need done, not even REVs.
I’m hoping either Ford or Ram with their REVs will come out with a 6 seat variant of them, but knowing my luck they’ll only be available in 5 seat variants, something completely unrelated to the electric drivetrain.
Even the medium-duty fleets are switching back from diesel to gasoline in some applications, the savings on fuel aren’t worth the headaches, and the 7.3 Ford Godzilla motor is a strong powerplant for smaller medium-duty applications like school busses and smaller box vans. GM made a huge mistake in selling off the 8.1 big-block, we still have a couple of them and they’re torque monsters and dead-nuts reliable.
Is it safe to assume there is a significant performance increase when this equipment is deleted, especially on commercial trucks?
I’m just wondering because my only experience with it is local dudes trying to make their brodozers look tougher or something.
This is a massive win for d-bags everywhere.
Polaris has already offered up a solution here.
This would be entirely different when the exhaust is piped back to the vehicle interior.
I appreciate trying to be fair, but some things are just objectively bad. This is one such.
*Looks at his straight pipes 12v Cummins* emissions equipment what is that? /s I get so many people asking me about DEF, DPF or any emission related questions about my truck and they find it hard to grasp a diesel truck from 30+ years ago did not have any of that and especially DEF since it is a more recent system in diesels. Having to deal with aftertreatment systems on semi trucks at work I am glad I do not have a modern diesel pickup with these systems as they cost a ton when things break.