Is this the death knell for readily available aftermarket tuning?

This is not new, it's been going on for years behind the scenes. It started with the coal rollers because those morons take glee in pissing people off and they're so visible, but it's happening throughout the industry. You can see the settled judgements on the EPA website - a million dollar fine for a shop in St. George, UT, for example. There are a lot of small shops getting hit as well. It looks like the fines are scaled to really hurt but not kill the company. The goal is to teach and prevent further misdeeds. Seeing a company like Bully Dog change from coal rolling tuners to CARB tested tunes is a bigger lesson to everyone else than having them disappear, honestly.

What's primarily being attacked is "emissions defeat devices". For example, diesel truck tuners that turn off the EGR/DPF system. But anything that increases emissions can legitimately be the cause for prosecution.

As Alfa noted, there are legal ways to do this. The easiest is to get a CARB EO, as that proves that your product does not increase emissions over stock. Not just the simple tailpipe test, but evaporative and other tests including taking mileage degradation into account. That's what we're doing - concentrating on obtaining EOs for existing parts and evaluating future parts on their effect on emissions. This doesn't make the tuning less readily available. Heck, I have a CARB legal tune in my 18 year old Grand Cherokee along with a CARB legal intake.

If you think "this doesn't apply to me because I don't have emissions tests", you are wrong. Things like pulling cats are still illegal on a federal level, so any company that promotes that is vulnerable - and potentially, so are you.

wspohn said:

My understading is that states like California don't really care about emissions - if they did, they woud test for emission levels and if you passed you'd be out of there regardless of whether or not you had original equipment.  But their system actually makes it illegal to change OEM equipment even if it results in an improvement in emissions level......makes zero sense to me.

It surprises me that vendors of CAT bypass pipes have been allowed continue for so long, too. Buy a lower restriction CAT, sure. Eliminate it, no.

Do you want to go through a $10k test to prove that your car does not have higher emissions? Not a goofy idle test or some low-speed dyno run on a hot car, but the full test including cold soaks and evaporative emissions testing? Of course not. That would be untenable.

A better option would be if a sample car was put through the tests, then any car with the same modifications is viewed as good. That way the test only needs to be done once but thousands of cars are given the green light as a result. And that's exactly what the CARB EO system is. It's actually a really good option, far better than "everything aftermarket is illegal" which would be a lot easier to implement.

If you think you can improve emissions over the factory with a simple tune, you do NOT understand the level of effort put into engine management by the OEs. The aftermarket is about a decade behind at best.

alfadriver said:

BTW, if IS the manufacturers responsibility to sell legal parts if they are going to be used on road.  That is the law, and that is exactly what FM is doing with their turbo kits.  

My point is still that a manufacturer does not control how the end user uses their products (on or off-road) and should not be responsible as if they somehow can control the end user. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that will use products outside of their intended purpose and ruin it for the rest of us.

I'm not one for defeating emissions equipment nor do I think anyone should. I have a late model turbo car that is tuned and I made the choice to go with an aftermarket catted downpipe, where many choose catless. Catalytic converters aren't the power robbing lumps that they used to be.

It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to produce parts that are not specifically designed to break the law. And the EPA has stated that claiming "off road" is not an excuse, as they don't distinguish. Thus the RPM Act.

I think the MS guys may have an exciting time ahead navigating this. There were other factors involved in our decision to drop user-programmable ECUs such as the support load, but the emissions crackdown was definitely part of it.

Keith Tanner said:

wspohn said:

My understading is that states like California don't really care about emissions - if they did, they woud test for emission levels and if you passed you'd be out of there regardless of whether or not you had original equipment.  But their system actually makes it illegal to change OEM equipment even if it results in an improvement in emissions level......makes zero sense to me.

It surprises me that vendors of CAT bypass pipes have been allowed continue for so long, too. Buy a lower restriction CAT, sure. Eliminate it, no.

Do you want to go through a $10k test to prove that your car does not have higher emissions? Not a goofy idle test or some low-speed dyno run on a hot car, but the full test including cold soaks and evaporative emissions testing? Of course not. That would be untenable.

A better option would be if a sample car was put through the tests, then any car with the same modifications is viewed as good. That way the test only needs to be done once but thousands of cars are given the green light as a result. And that's exactly what the CARB EO system is. It's actually a really good option, far better than "everything aftermarket is illegal" which would be a lot easier to implement.

If you think you can improve emissions over the factory with a simple tune, you do NOT understand the level of effort put into engine management by the OEs. The aftermarket is about a decade behind at best.

If I'm reading this right: It seems like the safest way forward would be for hard part manufacturers to sell kits with specific tested and approved tunes for each iteration. That would mean companies like Garrett et.al. would be better off as B2B entities as there's a lot of supporting parts that need to exist for their products to be utilized.

It probably wouldn't be a bad thing overall, as it could potentially spawn a whole new market segment, but it could get dicey in a lot for smaller manufacturers with niche focuses as it raises the barrier of entry.

Garrett is basically B2B. There are a lot of resellers, but I don't think you can buy directly from them. A turbocharger on its own is not an emissions defeat device or doesn't necessarily increase emissions (and we have the EO to prove it!). But once you start selling the complete system to put that turbo on a car, you should have an EO.

It does raise the cost of entry for little tiny shops and for low value oddball vehicles, no question. Edelbrock decided to do a legal supercharger kit for the ND Miata so that smaller shops could resell it, but it's unlikely anyone's going to go to that effort for a 20-year-old Hyundai. The availability will follow market demand.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Garrett was a poor example. I started out with James Barone and Damond Motorsports but changed it to someone more recognizable outside of my specific interest. I initially wrote the response wondering how it would affect "enthusiast" cars like the Golf R, Focus RS, and the upcoming Hyundai N line. Then I remembered that the Focus RS and car ST line is dead, and the Golf R was very limited. Hyundai is the only outlier. Mustang tuning houses would have a bit of an easier time due to their prevalence and Flyin' Miata is already there.

Since enthusiasts aren't exactly known for driving massive of sales in the under $100k segment so I'm not sure that it would hurt anything too severely. Enthusiasts, with the intent to modify, would still just sit on the sidelines and be more careful about buying whatever has support.

Sometimes I have to remember that I'm the outlier when I started modifying the hell out of a one year old car sub $30k car.

The0retical said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Garrett was a poor example. I started out with James Barone and Damond Motorsports but changed it to someone more recognizable outside of my specific interest. I initially wrote the response wondering how it would affect "enthusiast" cars like the Golf R, Focus RS, and the upcoming Hyundai N line. Then I remembered that the Focus RS and car ST line is dead, and the Golf R was very limited. Hyundai is the only outlier. Mustang tuning houses would have a bit of an easier time due to their prevalence and Flyin' Miata is already there.

Since enthusiasts aren't exactly known for driving massive of sales in the under $100k segment so I'm not sure that it would hurt anything too severely. Enthusiasts, with the intent to modify, would still just sit on the sidelines and be more careful about buying whatever has support.

Sometimes I have to remember that I'm the outlier when I started modifying the hell out of a one year old car sub $30k car.

My BRZ had an E85 tune, MXP Catback, 18x9.5 RPF1s with 255/35 Star Specs, Ground Control coilovers within a couple of months of bringing it home, new, from the dealership. 

The BRZ aftermarket is amazingly strong given the number of cars on the road. Some cars are always going to be popular to mod. Some may have parts in common with other cars, so you may be able to find (for example) a supercharger that might bolt on to a CX-3.

Extrapolating that you won't be able to do anything to your car very soon because one one or two companies had pre-existing laws (some over 40 years old) enforced upon them regarding the most extreme violation in the book doesn't make sense to me.

It's a lot more than one or two companies, and it's an ongoing prosecution. You've heard about JEGS getting hit with a headline fine, but you haven't heard about the little ones. For example, Modbargains.com got hit with $7000 in fines for selling 16 cat delete pipes in 2015-16. Two Brother Racing got $90,000. Evans Tuning got fined for selling AEM ECUs, HP Tuners licenses, COBB tuners and the like - that one's a bit scary.

https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/clean-air-act-vehicle-and-engine-enforcement-case-resolutions

Companies will either have to evolve or they will disappear.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

The tuner thing is tough- on one hand, when you put it in a race car, like the turbo buick in loosecannon's MG, the off road rules clearly apply.  There's zero chance that it will ever see real road time, and it will only be a race car.

On the other hand, I know of many people who crudely  modified their SHO as soon as it started to be sold in 2010, and I'm pretty sure most of them will be used on a daily basis, since it's a fast street car.  That's clearly not legal to sell a product that can do that.

To me, the easy solution to the tuner is to make sure that their product does not work in the original car.  If you look on the Ford Motorsports catalog, you can see that the harness adaptors are designed not to run when installed in a production vehicle, but it will work for a race car.  For the more modern cars, making sure that you can't tune production cars is pretty easy.

As always, these topics are overhyped. But even still it doesn’t matter, because, if they actually go after the tuning companies that make parts for racecars and not coal rolling trucks, then the tuning companies will just get smarter.

Everything will become a plug-in, off-road only piece of hardware that you can literally swap out in 10 minutes with a screwdriver for your OEM Ecu. 

How do you identify a production car vs a race car? If you're talking Cobra Jet, that's easy - you cook it into the car's software or change out the connectors because that vehicle was never intended to be anything else. But what about something the ND Global Cup cars, which start off as production Miatas before getting torn down? Or the previous generation MX5 Cup cars, which were just any random NC Miata that happened to get a cage bunged in? Heck, even loosecannon's car. How can a company build parts for that while ensuring they only get used on race cars?

For modern cars, there are so many other parts in an OEM car that if the ECU sees a anti theft system, some body modules, etc- then it knows it's a production car.  Given that the MX5 Cup cars are likely to be made just like the Cobra Jet cars (cars taken off the production line, given to company X, and are rebuilt as race cars)- it would be easy to 1) modify the calibration to know it's a race car, 2) take the VIN off the list of cars that can not be allowed on public roads.

How to prove a car like loosecannon's?  Not sure.  Other than the risk to the company that someone will turn him in like coal rollers is non existent.  Really- that's what's going on here.  Buyers say that the car won't be used on road, yet they are and are getting caught.  The only real thing they can do is make sure that the buyer signs some kind of affidavit that they are aware of the law, and will not violate it- with the threat of sharing the fine if caught.  BTW, this applies to the Ecoboost TVR that usernametaken is making, too.  Although there are state specific rules that can be sticky where the standard follows the engine vs the car.

The Global Cup cars actually don't get the body in white treatment, they're complete cars when they leave the factory. But the VINs are flagged.  If you identify a race car as one that doesn't have all the expected modules, then it's easy to make a street car look like a race car to anything plugged into the network by simply removing components. 

The NC MX5 Cup cars were more like Spec Miatas, anybody could make one out of a used car. They're no different than one-offs like the MG or the TVR. Those are the problem cars, the ones that were once passenger cars. Big problem for grassroots racing as opposed to more factory supported efforts.

Aren't there Ecoboost crates with an EO? There's a procedure to follow there if you want a legal engine swap, but I think that overall swaps are uncommon enough that they don't attract attention. Still, if you look in that link I provided earlier you'll discover that Moke America got in trouble for a dozen cars.

So the message we learn is that the EPA wants the rule breakers to stay in business?

Every regulatory agency is essentially pro-business. If they weren't they be defunded into a coma or completely disbanded under our current legislative 'representation'.  Some people (a lot of people) are more pro-business than they are anti-rape. If that doesn't sit right with you, don't turn on the news for a couple of weeks..

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I don't know about what Ford Motorsports sells.  They are kind of a black hole.

I did go to the link, and saw that a community in Puerto Rico got a $2000 fine for a Cat with a wrong engine in it.

I think part of the risk is how the stuff sold is marketed.  If you sell something that is clearly an off road use only product, and don't label it as such, then I think it's far more likely that you will get in trouble than for companies who clearly say what the product is for or is not.  So a 12 sale company who sells hacks to a Mustang could get in trouble vs. Ford Motorsports selling hundreds of products clearly for off road use only.  I recall calling someone about that, once...

Vigo said:

So the message we learn is that the EPA wants the rule breakers to stay in business?

Every regulatory agency is essentially pro-business. If they weren't they be defunded into a coma or completely disbanded under our current legislative 'representation'.  Some people (a lot of people) are more pro-business than they are anti-rape. If that doesn't sit right with you, don't turn on the news for a couple of weeks..

FWIW, they are legally required to be.  The rules don't come from a black hole, and they very much take into account what the impact on the economy and businesses could be.

NickD said:

Any time people say that something is the death of performance cars or performance tuning, it seems to come back stronger than ever.

You can, right now, buy cars so quick that the NHRA will not allow them on track without a rollcage.

You can, right now, buy cars from any of the Big 3 that make more power than ANYTHING from the 1960s with any kind of metric you can invent, with 100k mile warranties and emissions that is "unicorn farts and rainbows".

That is assuming that you don't want a recockulously fast hybrid or all-electric.

The future is a very interesting place, isn't it?

n8 said:

I think it's a slippery slope of accepting our EPA overlords and a tighter regulation of the aftermarket. I hate coal rollers as much as the next guy, but how will you feel when they come after our performance tuning software and devices? Megasquirt, Cobb Accessport, etc.

Megasquirt and COBB are already illegal for vehicles used on the road. 

alfadriver said:

z31maniac said:

Many tuners on many different platforms kill the secondary O2 sensor for a tune. Or remove the CEL for one that's been entirely removed. Which is why I find this particularly interesting. I'm not saying it is, and that's why I put the caveat of "readily available" in the title. 

Robbie, what I understood was that the EPA capped the fine so as not to put the company out of business.

dean1484, yeah it doesn't matter in some states, but does in others. We haven't had yearly inspections in Oklahoma since for the last 19-20 years. So CEL, no cats, etc, aren't an issue here. 

Why in the world would they feel the need to kill the second O2 sensor?  It has no bearing what so ever on performance.

Unless you are taking the catalyst out, which is a specific defeat device thing to do, and is very illegal.

I am still really, really pissed off at a certain tuner shop that took one of my client's cars and removed the wasn't-hurting-anything catalyst because "OMG cats kill power" or some stupid reason.

Said "tuner" (translation: dipE36 M3) shop also installed a 12-bolt with Ford 9" axle ends, and they didn't put axle seals in it.  When it predictably leaked, they smeared silicone over the bearings and slammed it back together.  A fact that I learned a couple hours ago.  The silicone ripped the dust seals out of the unitized bearings, destroying them.  It is zero surprise that a "tuner shop" (finger quotes) so incompetent as to think that a catalyst is a major restriction is also collectively stupid enough to slap a bunch of sealer goo around a bearing to stop a leak instead of installing seals that were missing yet should have been there in the first place.

I have driven and tuned cars with cats making 300hp more than that car did.  This is not 1975, these are not horrible pellet-bed catalysts.  There is only ONE legitimate reason to not run a catalyst:  The engine is so street-unfriendly that it blows so much unburnt air and fuel through the exhaust that a catalyst would overheat and melt down.

If Chrysler can certify a 707hp engine, if Ford can certify a 600+hp engine, if GM can certify a 600+hp engine, if Lingenfelter can California certify a 1000+hp engine in NINETEEN BERKING NINETY-NINE, with functional catalysts, then NO, your POS Miata is not going to choke and die if you have to put a cat on it.  (An actiual argument I heard at the RallyCross Nationals in 2013 when someone from Colorado running in PR found out that, yes, National rules require a catalyst in the exhaustL "I can't put a cat on my stock-engined, stock-computered Miata because it will kill the power."  OTOH this exchange prepared me for very much whining from RallyCrossers from Colorado who want to cheat)

Knurled. said:

n8 said:

I think it's a slippery slope of accepting our EPA overlords and a tighter regulation of the aftermarket. I hate coal rollers as much as the next guy, but how will you feel when they come after our performance tuning software and devices? Megasquirt, Cobb Accessport, etc.

Megasquirt and COBB are already illegal for vehicles used on the road. 

Actually, as mentioned earlier, they are illegal for vehicles after the Clean Air Act.  On road and off road.

Knurled. said:

There is only ONE legitimate reason to not run a catalyst:  The engine is so street-unfriendly that it blows so much unburnt air and fuel through the exhaust that a catalyst would overheat and melt down.

I still struggle with this one a bit.  Our Rallyx car is a Sentra SpecV.  Most of these that are still running have the primary cat deleted, because it degrades and takes the engine with it.

I suppose the answer is to just replace it more often, but the OE cat is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.  I'm not sure whether an aftermarket replacement would be safe or not.  Still toying with this idea to get the car legal again.

I believe MRS are similar.

ProDarwin said:

Knurled. said:

n8 said:

I think it's a slippery slope of accepting our EPA overlords and a tighter regulation of the aftermarket. I hate coal rollers as much as the next guy, but how will you feel when they come after our performance tuning software and devices? Megasquirt, Cobb Accessport, etc.

Megasquirt and COBB are already illegal for vehicles used on the road. 

Actually, as mentioned earlier, they are illegal for vehicles after the Clean Air Act.  On road and off road.

 

Knurled. said:

There is only ONE legitimate reason to not run a catalyst:  The engine is so street-unfriendly that it blows so much unburnt air and fuel through the exhaust that a catalyst would overheat and melt down.

I still struggle with this one a bit.  Our Rallyx car is a Sentra SpecV.  Most of these that are still running have the primary cat deleted, because it degrades and takes the engine with it.

I suppose the answer is to just replace it more often, but the OE cat is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.  I'm not sure whether an aftermarket replacement would be safe or not.  Still toying with this idea to get the car legal again.

I believe MRS are similar.

The primary cat of your car is defective as-produced.  Ford had a huge problem with this on the first generation of Duratec V6s.

The catalyst isn't the problem, the implementation is the problem.  Nissan simply didn't bother to do any sufficient engineering to make it work.  (I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.  Nissan products are only next to Kia/Hyundai on the "WTF were they thinking???" scale of poor engineering)

alfadriver said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I don't know about what Ford Motorsports sells.  They are kind of a black hole.

I did go to the link, and saw that a community in Puerto Rico got a $2000 fine for a Cat with a wrong engine in it.

I think part of the risk is how the stuff sold is marketed.  If you sell something that is clearly an off road use only product, and don't label it as such, then I think it's far more likely that you will get in trouble than for companies who clearly say what the product is for or is not.  So a 12 sale company who sells hacks to a Mustang could get in trouble vs. Ford Motorsports selling hundreds of products clearly for off road use only.  I recall calling someone about that, once...

Yeah, that PR fine was a weird one.

I remember that conversation :) We decided not to hope for success with the "for off-road use only" disclaimer, going as legal as possible made everyone more comfortable. Heck, right now we're having enough of a hassle with warning Californians about how they'll get cancer from everything.