> Illegal Tampering by Diesel Pickup Owners Is Worsening Pollution
The solution to this is not to make tampering hard or illegal, but instead to simply have random spot checks and hefty fines for those caught doing it.
It would work like this:
* The truck detects tampering has occurred, and pops up a warning (repeated once a month) saying "Warning: Your emissions system may have a fault, and should be checked by a professional. Driving a vehicle that does not meet emissions laws could incur a fine of $10k."
* Each state trains a few police officers on use of a rolling road and emissions checking equipment. They pull vehicles over at random and test them. They issue large fines to those who don't pass the test (with a big discount for those where the emissions failure appears to be due to neglect rather than deliberate tampering).
* Publish in local media stories of those caught, include figures of how many people air pollution has killed in the state. Make sure you get some quotes from the mother of a trucker who has died from lung cancer, etc.
Soon far fewer people will be modding their trucks...
> The truck detects tampering has occurred, and pops up a warning (repeated once a month) saying "Warning: Your emissions system may have a fault, and should be checked by a professional. Driving a vehicle that does not meet emissions laws could incur a fine of $10k."
This is impossible. Anyone who can figure out how to modify ECU programming (this isn't trivial) can figure out how to turn off that notice.
Of course. But now they can't claim they didn't know that DIY replacing their exhaust pipe with a 'cheap' one was going to make the emissions illegal.
Any garage doing this for their customers will also have a harder time in court when they try to explain to the jury that they deliberately hid a message intended to notify their customer of illegal emissions.
If your car violates emissions the check engine light will come on. Isn't that enough - why do we need a new light for this? The scan tool will tell you why the light it one. Note that there is no general way to tell the difference between replacing replacing parts that violate emissions with the correct parts failing. That takes a mechanic looking at the sensor values and checking the entire system to see why a sensor is out of range.
Besides most of the above emissions changes are specifically about changing the programming of the ECU. While you can make mechanical changes, they typically only have a small effect and so you wouldn't notice. However if you change the ECU programming you can get a lot more power out of the engine - at the expense of engine life and emissions. Which is why I say that the only people doing this to their cars will just turn off the code that turns that light on: they are already changing the code of the ECU.
The solution to this is not to make tampering hard or illegal, but instead to simply have random spot checks and hefty fines for those caught doing it.
It would work like this:
* The truck detects tampering has occurred, and pops up a warning (repeated once a month) saying "Warning: Your emissions system may have a fault, and should be checked by a professional. Driving a vehicle that does not meet emissions laws could incur a fine of $10k."
* Each state trains a few police officers on use of a rolling road and emissions checking equipment. They pull vehicles over at random and test them. They issue large fines to those who don't pass the test (with a big discount for those where the emissions failure appears to be due to neglect rather than deliberate tampering).
* Publish in local media stories of those caught, include figures of how many people air pollution has killed in the state. Make sure you get some quotes from the mother of a trucker who has died from lung cancer, etc.
Soon far fewer people will be modding their trucks...