[VB] FW: CA emissions.

[Aubrey Allen]

The gross polluter stuff get's tricky. Most the time, if you take it to a smog certified mechanic, you can talk him or her into running the test once before they do the official test which is linked to a DMV database, so they get real time, instant results, so the mechanic is not fraudulent. Back in the 90's the Government gave breaks to gas and coal producing, and electrical producing companies for their amount of air pollution if they took gross polluters off the highways. There was a policy where companies paid citizen's to bring in their vehicles older than 1975 so they could be crushed for $500.00. It was still a lot of money for cars back then. What ended up happening was most of the cars brought in and crushed didn't run since something like transmissions or engines were seized, and those vehicles were not on the road in the first place. The other atrocity was many of the vehicles were vintage, there was a whole bunch of propaganda they ran so
 dirty. In fact they ran perfectly well when tuned properly and wouldn't be polluter's if they had a water injecter or hardened valves swapped to burn the newly introduced unleaded gas, and finally took off the market the leaded fuel. That would have been much better for the environment than the carbon footprint it takes to create wood and clay molds and producing the plastic, vinyl, sheetmetal, wiring, rubber and paint to create a new car. After a fewyears the EPA kept testing the air in California, and noticed there was a negligible difference in the change of air pollution. They pulled the funding to pay for the cars, and we lost a ton of vehicles that were perfectly fine and only needed small repairs to run again. The money would have been better spent restoring habitat, and telling the companies tuff-luck, they need to figure out a cleaner way to get rid of the heat in the process, and not let so much unprocessed product into the air. Now the
 smarter companies do that anyways to make bigger profits, and more diverse products from the process start to finish.