Diesel Tuner Faces Year in Prison

You know what will have a bigger effect on NOx than getting all the deleted diesels off the road? The migration to electric lawn equipment, which account for 12% of our annual NOx emmisions.

In reply to Opti :

I'm not sure why you're against this enforcement of existing rules? Air quality has improved massively since the Clean Air Act became law. This is helping. It's not ineffective. It's not a waste of time. It's not solely focusing on diesels. All of the sectors that contribute to US emissions are seeing similar tightening of restrictions.

And not only is it helping clean up air quality, if it weren't for emissions standards, we probably wouldn't have the powerful cars and trucks that we do right now. The effectiveness of diesel emissions systems is a huge reason why they get the power that they do. And they're still cleaner than any of the old stuff. If anybody wants to keep an old 12 valve or 7.3 Powerstroke on the road to avoid emissions systems that's just fine with me. They're doing less harm than the newer stuff after a delete. But they're not going to be as capable either.

I'm not against these regulations. I think they have done good, especially in the early years when you could see the smog as you rolled into a city. I think they've done good because the vast majority of people are compliant. Making new diesels have stricter emissions standards has had a much larger impact then going after a handful of guys (relatively on the macro level) deleting older trucks.

I'm not against enforcement either, but it's obvious this is a vendetta. The epa has pages and pages dedicated to all the deleted diesels and cases, when the actual effect it will have is immaterial (which is my WHOLE arguement)

What I care about is results, and by that I mean a real reduction in emissions/pollution, I don't think these actions will lead to that. I presented my reasoning for believing that, and the response was "I'm not sure why your against enforcement?"

Let's see if we can figure out where we disagree.

Do you think they will get to 100% compliance?

Do you disagree with the numbers I used to come up with 115k tons of NOx a year, if you think they will get to 100% compliance?

Do you think that's a material difference?

If we disagree that's fine, but to me it's like when the government makes a big to do about cutting 500 million from the budget, and people don't realize the budget is 6.6 trillion, and they effectively did nothing

In reply to Opti :

I think that we agree that deleted diesels are an outsized source of emissions that have some pretty nasty side effects. I think it's pretty easy to enforce existing laws to reduce the number of deleted diesels that will end up on the road (even if the number currently on the road doesn't change at all, they're not going to be adding more at the same rate they otherwise would be if they didn't go after these tuners). And over time, the older deleted trucks will be taken off the road.

I also think that we should all be doing what is in our power to improve the situation, rather than turning a blind eye to what is becoming a larger and larger percentage of both smog forming and GHG emissions. Diesel deletes tend to be obvious (bad optics), and they're also pretty bad for air quality and the environment. They're an obvious target. But it's not the sole focus of the EPA. They're tightening restrictions on the whole automotive industry, the entire transportation sector, and other sectors simultaneously. So I don't see it as a vendetta, but as a part of a larger effort. It's just that the coal rollers are low hanging fruit at this point.

Opti said:

You know what will have a bigger effect on NOx than getting all the deleted diesels off the road? The migration to electric lawn equipment, which account for 12% of our annual NOx emmisions.

Agreed. Good thing we can do multiple things at one time right? Not only are consumers freely choosing battery options at a rapidly increasing rate, but there are already places set to begin banning the sale of small ICEs. Again, this isn't a situation where one sector gets a free pass while others see crackdowns. Everybody is expected to tighten up and reduce their impact.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

State sniffer tests have nothing to do with the emissions standards that OEMs certify to.  OEM run a cycle, measure the mass of each emission over the entire cycle and then do some corrections.  And that's now repeated over a number of different cycles. Not at all a steady ppm measurement. 
 

And the standards that modifiers use is based on the same tests and measurements. Not a sniffer test at an inspection shop. 

In reply to Opti :

The deleted diesels may be a small fry, but so was the original fine. It's turned into jail time thanks to that fine being ignored. 
 

Otherwise, what are you getting at?  Laws should not be enforced?  Not sure what your point is anymore. 

In reply to Opti :

It's worth noting that per capita pollution has dropped a fair bit. The above doesn't consider the ~30% increase in population.

In reply to alfadriver :

I don't know how to make it clearer or how many times I've said I'm not defending the guy, he picked a fight and lost, and had plenty of time to turn it around and chose not to.

What I'm getting at is this recent fixation on deleted diesels is dumb because it's not actually going to materially reduce emissions, because they are way to small of a population that already doesn't care about breaking the law. 

What is this question "Laws should not be enforced?" Are you being serious or just trying to make my position sound as extreme as possible? You do understand that there are various levels of enforcement of laws In this country from completely ignoring the law to almost zero tolerance, right? My point isn't that laws shouldn't be enforced, it's that this isn't the most effective use of the EPAs time and resources, because like you say they are a small fry. It is purely political, they have a bad guy they get to parade around saying look at all the good we did, meanwhile nothing really changes.

In reply to Nathan JansenvanDoorn :

Per capita emissions can be a useful metric, but many times it's used as a way to say we did something without actually doing something.

If we dropped per capita emissions but population levels went up so we are at the essentially the same total emissions levels, have we done anything, is the air and water any cleaner? 

What I care about is a material difference in total emissions. I don't think fixation on deleted diesels will do that. I think it's political so the EPA has their prize to parade around, all the while emissions will not change in a meaningful way.

In reply to STM317 :

Since you say people are freely moving to electric, it sounds like you are saying market forces have a larger effect than the EPA.

You are then attributing something to the EPA, by saying no sector gets a free pass, in response to my arguement, that the EPA should use the resources they are wasting on the 5 year long investigations and court cases to do something that may really help, while in reality its CARB doing the banning and normal market forces having the impact here.

In reply to Opti :

Many air pollutants HAVE dropped significantly in that period, as demonstrated by others in this thread - though not greenhouse gases. Air quality is generally significantly better than 30 years ago (you agree to that earlier in this thread). 
 

Your post implies we have done nothing, but imagine that we're really true!
 

I still find the diesel crackdown strange at least at the manufacturer level.  They have a much lower co2 output than gas powered vehicles with higher nox.  Nox can have some bad effects, but for the most part it is less harmful than co2 or methane.  In one year the acceptable levels of nox were greatly reduced forcing manufacturers to add expensive emissions equipment, or cheat like VW.

Now because of the VW scandal & the visibility of the smoke tuned diesel trucks it's good media to go after them.  I cant say I would feel bad about less smoke tuned trucks or atack tuned cars on the road, but where does it stop?  This guy was an idiot for ignoring multiple warnings & he deserves to be punished.  The more cases like this we see the smaller group they are going to go after.  Look at all the class action law suits that have been popping up lately.

In reply to Opti :

Why do you think they are only able to focus that narrowly?  Given pollution sources, the actual enforcement of the laws has been pretty easy, so the number of people working on enforcing tampering laws is considerably smaller than working on new ones. 
And the EPA and CARB are very much working on new versions and changes to all sources- mobile and stationary. They are addressing exactly what you are concerned about. 
 

But you are questioning whether they enforce the law. This is one area that had they not, the amount of tampering would go up quickly enough to have a huge impact, so it's better in the long run to enforce what seems to be small to keep it small. 
 

WE are the ones fixating on tampered diesels. The EPA is working on the system. And in that is enforcing the law. 

Opti said:

In reply to STM317 :

Since you say people are freely moving to electric, it sounds like you are saying market forces have a larger effect than the EPA.

You are then attributing something to the EPA, by saying no sector gets a free pass, in response to my arguement, that the EPA should use the resources they are wasting on the 5 year long investigations and court cases to do something that may really help, while in reality its CARB doing the banning and normal market forces having the impact here.

 

Market forces are great. It means regulators don't have to step in as much. Battery lawn equipment just makes a lot of sense, and the cost is low enough that it's attainable for most homeowners. The EPA isn't likely to enact new nationwide bans because they're Federal and tend to leave local enforcement to the States. If you think penalizing this specific diesel tuner was an inefficient use of resources, wait until you have to fight a bunch of States Rights cases in a dozen different states simultaneously that get dragged out for years. CARB is much better suited for that type of new legislation for that reason.

You keep saying that the EPA is wasting time and resources on enforcement like this, but you haven't quantified that at all, or given an example of a better use of those resources. The idea here is not to immediately reduce pollution, it's to keep it from getting worse in the short term, and improve it over time (decades). As emissions controlled diesels age and get into the hands of the second, third, fourth buyers they're far more likely to be deleted than a brand new $60k-100k truck. The regulators are trying to prevent that, so that the 550k trucks already out there don't grow to 750k trucks or 1 million trucks 5 years from now.

The regulators are basically preventing a few thousand illegally modified super polluting diesels from ever hitting the road, and it seems like you consider that to be a waste because there's no immediate reduction in emissions. But the only way to really see an immediate reduction would be to remove existing deleted trucks rather than focusing on prevention. Do you want nationwide sniffer tests for every vehicle? Because that's how you get nationwide sniffer tests for every vehicle. I can understand the logic there, and I might support that effort, but there's no way that trying to catch half a million individuals spread out across the country (and that number would grow daily with no effort to prevent illegal sales), or setting up nationwide sniffer tests is more efficient than penalizing and disincentivizing selling this stuff in the first place.

In reply to Nathan JansenvanDoorn :

I didn't say we haven't done nothing, infact I mentioned how good it was we can breathe in a city now. I'm saying this action, having a vendetta against deleted diesels, is doing nothing. The stricter standards for new diesels has made an improvement, chasing a tiny populace already breaking the law and wasting years and tons of resources hasn't done anything.

In reply to alfadriver :

Things are finite people. That includes resources and time. 

I presented my case on why I think removing all the deleted diesels (which will never happen) will have an immaterial effect, I even used the EPAs own numbers. If people think we can actually reach that goal and it is a material difference. Cool that's where we disagree, but I haven't seen anybody say that. I've seen, it's not a waste of time, because they are also doing other stuff.

The fact that they are doing other stuff is irrelevant to wether this action is a waste of resources. If they are doing something futile, they should reallocate those resources to projects that may actually help. Remember the goal is to reduce emissions/pollution.

The arguement that if they hadn't we'd have more (we are talking about things at the macro level so material differences is what matters) deleted diesels I don't buy. There was effectively no enforcement up until just recently, and we only have an estimated 550k deleted diesels. Essentially even before enforcement we were at an 85 percent compliance, and that's when you take the smallest sample size possible. How high are we going to get that number? Even then its such a small populace will it make a difference? Based on the EPAs numbers I don't think so.

alfadriver said:

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

State sniffer tests have nothing to do with the emissions standards that OEMs certify to.  OEM run a cycle, measure the mass of each emission over the entire cycle and then do some corrections.  And that's now repeated over a number of different cycles. Not at all a steady ppm measurement. 
 

And the standards that modifiers use is based on the same tests and measurements. Not a sniffer test at an inspection shop. 

I'm well aware of that.  Hence why I said "for example" and used inspection numbers for a comparison.  I wasn't trying to imply that they were the same.

Caperix said:

I still find the diesel crackdown strange at least at the manufacturer level.  They have a much lower co2 output than gas powered vehicles with higher nox.  Nox can have some bad effects, but for the most part it is less harmful than co2 or methane.  In one year the acceptable levels of nox were greatly reduced forcing manufacturers to add expensive emissions equipment, or cheat like VW.

Now because of the VW scandal & the visibility of the smoke tuned diesel trucks it's good media to go after them.  I cant say I would feel bad about less smoke tuned trucks or atack tuned cars on the road, but where does it stop?  This guy was an idiot for ignoring multiple warnings & he deserves to be punished.  The more cases like this we see the smaller group they are going to go after.  Look at all the class action law suits that have been popping up lately.

Because some pretty people with Oscars said it smells funny.  

That's only half joking.  Jenny McCarthy got some other celebs together and waged an all-out crackdown on how their kids are dying on diesel school buses because the exhaust smells terrible.  Aside from the fact that I highly doubt those celebs' kids actually rode a school bus, there was absolutely nothing behind their tirade other than A) they could see the exhaust, and B) it smelled bad.

Yes, diesel exhaust has some yucky stuff it in.  So does gasoline exhaust.  We can discuss the goods and bads, but it gets a bit tiring when there are nearly political-level misconceptions that still exist.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

alfadriver said:

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

State sniffer tests have nothing to do with the emissions standards that OEMs certify to.  OEM run a cycle, measure the mass of each emission over the entire cycle and then do some corrections.  And that's now repeated over a number of different cycles. Not at all a steady ppm measurement. 
 

And the standards that modifiers use is based on the same tests and measurements. Not a sniffer test at an inspection shop. 

I'm well aware of that.  Hence why I said "for example" and used inspection numbers for a comparison.  I wasn't trying to imply that they were the same.

The margin you used as an example doesn't exist, which is kind of important 

In reply to Opti :

You also have to remember that the EPA isn't removing the trucks, they are preventing the modification to be sold. And penalizing the company who sold them illegally. That's all the power they have. 

This guy asked for and deserved what he got, but it is frustrating to see this annoying little troll the EPA got into a tiff with get squashed while large-scale offenders are still on the loose...and that coal rolling has brought so much attention to the rest of the ECU tuning market. Don't forget that Cobb had to change their software a few months ago.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

They had to change their software so tuners couldn't turn off emissions sensitive stuff, like the rear O2 sensors.  I don't have a problem with that.

I imagine Cobb would have gotten hammered just the same if they ignored the warning and just kept going business as usual.