Passed CA Smog!!!

[Tom]

Congrats on the successful test!

That testing is something I actually miss from my car's time in Cali, something that might surprise or even amuse some folks. Local smog guy at his gas station near a property in OC was a car guy, so every visit for the car was a chance to visit and socialize. Most important was the learnings from the various tests over the decades. Slowly creeping tailpipe NOx offered clues about injectors that needed cleaning, for instance. Maybe extra valuable was his willingness to use the two pre-cat test port pipes in the engine bay, which offers the ability to isolate symptoms to one bank on the V8.

Now, out here in the wilds of central Oregon, I'm not aware of anyone who even offers that simple level of diagnostics, and certainly not for the relatively low test fees in OC. I can add a wideband CO sensor for fuel/air mixture, but unfortunately there's no no similar cheap-and-easy option for HC and NOx.

After living through the ugly times in the L.A. basin and watching the slow but steady improvements in air quality over the decades, I'm still a big fan of testing and compliance. Here, I can regularly get a reminder about 'the good old days' with the windows down at a stoplight. I suspect we are a substantial market for Cali cars that wouldn't pass inspection.

I wonder if eventually smog testing in CA will be limited to OBDII-equipped cars and/or they do away with the dyno test requirements and go back to idle and 2500rpm no-load tests. Either that, or the cost of dyno tests will get to be silly expensive. Over the course of the last 3 smog test cycles, a solid majority of shops around here have stopped running the dyno tests. It's just so much easier and more profitable to run an OBDII scan, issue the certificate, collect $40+, and move on to the next car in 10 minutes or less. My test took a solid 40 minutes in comparison. That, and the number of pre-OBDII cars diminishes every day, making the investment in dyno equipment harder and harder to justify as a shop owner.

On an unrelated note, it feels like private shops figured out some time ago that nit-picking every last wingnut is bad for business these days. The 'visual' component of the test is nothing like it used to be. In the early days of CA smog, they would scour your car and make money by finding ticky-tacky 'visual' problems they could use to bilk money out of you (e.g., I once 'bought' a $10 wingnut; and had to 'tip' a guy $20 for the time he claimed it would take to look up various smog rules). That model seems to have given way to just doing as many cars as quickly as they can -- presumably because shops just can't get away with mischief any longer in our insta-Yelp world.

[cda951]

Tom, I hope you're right. There is a stillborn bill in the CA state house to exempt '83 and older vehicles from the CA smog test (which would of course not help 951 owners), which would be a step in the right direction, but I am not holding my breath. Such a thing is not a priority for most legislators, and anything that does not appear to be "green" (despite being a practical improvement for the ever-shrinking pool of '76-83 CA light vehicle owners and smog shops which are forced to maintain aging equipment) would not be a good look for most of them.

I agree with @dr bob about not being against the CA smog program in general. I must admit that I am biased because it puts food on my table as much of the work I do at my shop is diagnosing and repairing "check engine" light issues to ensure that customer cars (the full spectrum of Porsche/BMW from 1976 to the late 2010s) pass smog.

Stepping back, I also appreciate the reduction of smog in the LA basin and other areas any time I venture south. As seen in my signature, I have a fleet of silly old cars, but keep them in good tune, and those with catalytic converters from the factory all pass CA smog with flying colors, even the junkyard Alfa GTV6, which has recently returned to daily driver duty.