Recently, the EPA and COBB Tuning have settled after the latter was sued for providing emissions control defeating equipment. As per the EPA’s settlement details document, COBB Tuning have since 2015 provided customers with the means to disable certain emission controls in cars, in addition to selling aftermarket exhaust pipes with insufficient catalytic systems. As part of the settlement, COBB Tuning will have to destroy any remaining device, delete any such features from its custom tuning software and otherwise take measures to fully comply with the Clean Air Act, in addition to paying a $2,914,000 civil fine.
The tuning of cars has come a long way from the 1960s when tweaking the carburetor air-fuel ratios was the way to get more power. These days cars not only have multiple layers of computers and sensor systems that constantly monitor and tweak the car’s systems, they also have a myriad of emission controls, ranging from permissible air-fuel ratios to catalytic converters. It’s little surprise that these systems can significantly impact the raw performance one might extract from a car’s engine, but if the exhaust of nitrogen-oxides and other pollutants is to be kept within legal limits, simply deleting these limits is not a permissible option.
COBB Tuning proclaimed that they weren’t aware of these issues, and that they never marketed these features as ’emission controls defeating’. They were however aware of issues regarding their products, which is why they announced ‘Project Green Speed’ in 2022, which supposedly would have brought COBB into compliance. Now it would seem that the EPA did find fault despite this, and COBB was forced to making adjustments.
Although perhaps not as egregious as modifying diesel trucks to ‘roll coal’, federal law has made it abundantly clear that if you really want to have fun tweaking and tuning your car without pesky environmental laws getting in the way, you could consider switching to electric drivetrains, even if they’re mind-numbingly easy to make performant compared to internal combustion engines.
Now this needs to be open sourced!
It’s such a good idea! We’ll be able to add MeshTastic features!
And just remember, the only reason the EPA gets away with any of this rent-seeking is that they go after the manufacturers. If they were forced to actually enforce the laws they create from whole cloth on an individual level, they’d get disbanded faster than you can say “nitrous.” Just imagine if every car sale broke out “additional costs incurred due to government regulation” on an itemized basis…
What I don’t get is why they weren’t marketing them as track-only devices. The exceptions for racing vehicles are so nonexistent that you can burn printed EPA regulations for a steam engine if you want. The vehicle just becomes illegal to drive on the street afterwards.
According to the EPA modifying a road legal car to be track only does not make it exempt. You can build a track car from scratch, but if you start with something that was emissions compliant it technically must remain compliant.
There are countless people who have been deleting these systems by themselves for decades. With a little research and help from our friends in eastern europe or china, deleting any emissions system is quite doable by a hobby level mechanic. And what choice do people have? When you are barely getting by paying your bills, and your emissions system fails with a repair cost averaging between $3,000 and $8,000 depending on the vehicle type, but a delete will cost you only $800, what do you do? There is only one choice if you want to keep a roof over your head and keep making it to your job every day.
I completely disagree with rechargeable vehicles being the “solution” to “tweaking” our cars – We have private jets, rocket launches, mass plastic being dumped in the ocean as the real pollution concerns – While citizens driving LEV’s and ULEV’s which are so clean you can practically breathe the emissions out the tailpipe being told that they are the problem. It’s all a big lie designed to make the corporations and investment firms who own the “green” companies and solutions earn more and more money at the citizen’s expense.
Furthermore, rechargeable cars are horribly toxic and dangerous.
2 days ago, not far from my house, a tesla collided head on with a small SUV. Speeds were low; Both vehicle cabins were fully intact, only front end damage. However, the tesla instantly went thermal and the tesla driver died screaming in fire as he wasn’t able to get out of the vehicle fast enough. Worse yet, both passengers in the SUV where overwhelmed by the toxic smoke coming out of the tesla and were overwhelmed, they both died as well.
Rechargeable cars are NOT a solution for anything but destruction and chaos, and hopefully we can soon completely gut the EPA’s authority to do anything at all thanks to the chevron deference ruling.
Until all child slave labor is removed from the rechargeable car supply chain (and by now you should all know that the rechargeable car fully depends on child slave labor even at the current prices which are unafforable by anyone but the rich), no one should be doing anything but shaming them.
Can you provide a news link about the horrible Tesla accident you mentioned?
What are you talking about? What emissions system is failing that costs that much and the car won’t work? Every car I’ve ever driven with an emissions system that could fail would just throw an error code and keep on going. They don’t even go into limp mode.
Someone just “barely getting by” is not driving a new car with a fancy emissions system, and is just gonna ignore the engine code.
COBB is not cheap gear, it’s for people with money to burn. They knew what people were using it for, and continued to do what they were doing. Nobody was “just trying to make it to work each day”.
“We have private jets, rocket launches, mass plastic being dumped in the ocean as the real pollution concerns”
If only we had an organization charged with protecting the environment. Maybe we could call it the Environmental Protection Organization.
If I own it I should be able to do whatever I want with it if its legal.
In many states its 100% legal to delete, modify, or do pretty much whatever you want with your vehicle’s tune, or do anything else with it as well as long as it has lights, can keep up with traffic, and doesn’t annoy others.
Most people don’t have the technical knowledge to safely tune their vehicle anyway.
Like most people don’t have the technical knowledge to install an Android alt on their phone.
This is on par with a government suing LineageOS, if LineageOS produced a tool for modifying Android devices.
If COBB doesn’t go open source as a big F-YOU to the EPA then all of the development time and marketing will have been for nothing.