This is a lot more about money than it is about environmentalism
This is a lot more about money than it is about environmentalism
_ said: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.
Yeah, I could buy a plug-in module to tune my 135i........but piggybacks are janky, terrible solutions to the problem.
If you're talking about an aftermarket ECU that plugs straight into the CAN bus and operates all the existing ancillaries properly................then you're sadly mistaken. Go look up the cost of a true standalone setup........that doesn't include a wiring harness, tune, etc.
You guys still don’t get it. There is NO off road exception. Just wait until OEMs go the route of the farm implement manufacturers. They claim their software is proprietary and that only their licensed techs can work on it. That’s how the OEMs will stop aftermarket “tuning” and potential EPA liability (and the ever loving income stream) Not to mention the end of your local mechanic.
In reply to maj75 :
There's too much money and too many interest groups to go full proprietary ala John Deere. They were able to get away with it, but just barely. Autos would force lawmakers to do something.
That doesn't mean someone may not try it but I wouldn't want to be the first to make that dive and have to defend myself from lawsuits and the PR hit.
Even then. There's a lot of smart people in the aftermarket. It took COBB less than 6 months to crack the ECU of the Mazdaspeed3 and took Flyin Miata less that that to figure out the CANN Bus in the ND Miata to make a whole different engine work with the electrics (Feel free to correct me Keith.) Will, ways, and all that.
In reply to maj75 :
Farmers have found ways around that, and car modders will too.
We live in a world where anything with a pulse can buy a lightly used vehicle with over 700hp for less than the median annual income in the US. That 700hp comes with a factory warranty, meets emissions standards in all 50 states, and is fully crash tested.
We live in a world where modern diesel trucks come from the factory with 900ft-lbs of torque and the ability to tow 30,000lbs. And again, all of this happens with full emissions compliance and a warranty.
Todays minivans can outrun muscle cars from the 90s in the quarter mile with a litter of kids in tow.
And all of these examples do these incredible feats (more power, cleaner emissions, etc) using the same or less fuel as their predecessors.
Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy. Nobody can leave it alone. Everybody always wants "more". Tuning out or removing emissions equipment is just selfish now. If you want to put a power adder on your new car, there are legal options for that, or there's demand for somebody to create one. These tuners are fine for older stuff and swapping newer engines into older vehicles, but at this point, I don't see much purpose for these tuners on modern vehicles unless they're sold as part of an emissions compliant package.
The0retical said:In reply to maj75 :
There's too much money and too many interest groups to go full proprietary ala John Deere. They were able to get away with it, but just barely. Autos would force lawmakers to do something.
That doesn't mean someone may not try it but I wouldn't want to be the first to make that dive and have to defend myself from lawsuits and the PR hit.
Even then. There's a lot of smart people in the aftermarket. It took COBB less than 6 months to crack the ECU of the Mazdaspeed3 and took Flyin Miata less that that to figure out the CANN Bus in the ND Miata to make a whole different engine work with the electrics (Feel free to correct me Keith.) Will, ways, and all that.
People seem to forget the aftermarket industry around vehicles like the Mustang, Camaro, and Vette. And that OEM's want that industry to keep going- to the point of them making their own race cars for sale.
BTW, the Can Bus path is generally helped via OEM's if you are a good company. If you are not, then you are left to the hacking group, and are totally on your own. Including not knowing that there are security measures where a dealer will know you hacked the car, and will not cover what broke.
Toebra said:This is a lot more about money than it is about environmentalism
No, it's about actually enforcing the laws on the books.
_ said: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.
You mean, like a plug-in module that can reprogram your stock ECU with no tools at all? Ask Bully Dog and the other diesel tuners how that worked out. A lot of these guys were providing tuners that allowed you to turn off the EGR and DPF "for offroad use", and that industry got hit hard.
It took us a lot longer than 6 months to get the ND CAN integration to work well. Oh, getting the engine to integrate enough to get the car to run was quick enough, but you would not believe how integrated all the systems are. Even the fuel gauge is remarkably complex, incorporating instantaneous and average fuel consumption into the calculated fuel level - don't ask me why, I'm giving an example of the sort of problems you can encounter. I disagree that the OEMs are helping, GM has stopped supplying their CAN message data to outsiders and Mazda US says they don't even have access, that it's all Mazda Japan and they don't share. Perhaps Ford is a little more open but you'd have to have a seriously close relationship with the company. Closer than anyone has with Mazda, that's for sure. Want to prove me wrong? Get me a document showing all the CAN messages for a given modern car. Something a generation old doesn't count 
What we're seeing now is manufacturers allowing full access for diagnostics and repair but locking down everything else. There's good reason, the Jeep remote control exploit woke a lot of people up. CAN traffic is encrypted so you can't inject your own signal into the network. This doesn't affect repair shops but it does make things like our ND V8s a lot more difficult to accomplish unless you can get someone to help you with that encryption. There are a lot of smart people in the aftermarket, but there are also a lot of smart people at the OEs and they get to create the tools.
maj75 said:You guys still don’t get it. There is NO off road exception. Just wait until OEMs go the route of the farm implement manufacturers. They claim their software is proprietary and that only their licensed techs can work on it. That’s how the OEMs will stop aftermarket “tuning” and potential EPA liability (and the ever loving income stream) Not to mention the end of your local mechanic.
The Right to Repair Act would have to be repealed first.
alfadriver said: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.
Well written and explained. Race cars are and should be tunable while cars intended for the street shouldn’t.
If you want a 700 horsepower car don’t buy a 200 hp car and tune it to 700 to commute to and from work and do the shopping.
The problem is still cars that start as street cars. Like every autocross car, every track day car, every car running in Chump/Lemons or most grassroots race events. If you want to allow them to have modifications, how do you do that? Answer that and the relationship between racers, shops and the EPA gets a lot easier.
Keith Tanner said:The problem is still cars that start as street cars. Like every autocross car, every track day car, every car running in Chump/Lemons or most grassroots race events. If you want to allow them to have modifications, how do you do that? Answer that and the relationship between racers, shops and the EPA gets a lot easier.
Take away the things that make a car civilized. HVAC, radio, power accessories, etc etc.
Let me rephrase.
How do you sell parts that allow a street car to run on the track without running afoul of emissions regulations? Somehow make it so it only works if the HVAC/radio/power accessories/"etc" are removed? Possible in a modern car, perhaps, but of course you have to way to prevent someone from doing the same to their own street car. I've run a Miata on the street with no HVAC, radio or power accessories or even a top.
Wouldnt the simple answer have Nationwide sniffer tests and if cars pass that they are road legal based on some kind of scale based on the cars age?
Or alternatively, if one wants to install off road only parts on their car, the title for the car must be marked as off road use only so it can't be plated...
See my description of the EO process earlier in the thread for the "simple answer". Short version: sniffer tests are too easy to pass.
Having flagged vins is an interesting idea.
93EXCivic said:Wouldnt the simple answer have Nationwide sniffer tests and if cars pass that they are road legal based on some kind of scale based on the cars age?
Or alternatively, if one wants to install off road only parts on their car, the title for the car must be marked as off road use only so it can't be plated...
because, as has been noted before in this thread, it isn't just about idle or warmed up driving emissions. There is so much more involved.
This isn't about slapping Holley Sniper EFI on your Chevelle, its about so much more.
Keith Tanner said:Let me rephrase.
How do you sell parts that allow a street car to run on the track without running afoul of emissions regulations? Somehow make it so it only works if the HVAC/radio/power accessories/"etc" are removed? Possible in a modern car, perhaps, but of course you have to way to prevent someone from doing the same to their own street car. I've run a Miata on the street with no HVAC, radio or power accessories or even a top.
Hell, I've driven customer cars where all that was inoperative and they weren't terribly concerned.
Was going to buy an XR4Ti where all of that was inoperative before reality set in (reality: "You're flat broke and have five stalled project cars, what the berk are you thinking?")
I always ask the question of how much damage is it really doing?
Notwithstanding the article involves diesels, for which I have no great love, cars have been injected for a long time, and my perception is that the worst running of them is orders of magnitude cleaner than a reasonably tuned carbureted car.
And long gone are the days when somebody bought a 750 double pumper and threw it on an otherwise stock 305.
OMG, that tuned car is 100% more polluting than a stock vehicle!
Well, 2mm is 100% more than 1mm, but compared to 1 Km, it's not much in the grand scheme of things.
Given that car hobbyists are a miniscule part of the population, what is the real impact?
What are the numbers?
Whole population of vehicles vs. Modded vs. Poorly modded in absolute values.
How tightly does it really need to be regulated?
In reply to OldGray320i :
There are over seven billion people on the planet. When we first started really playing with cars, there were less than two billion. More people means more pollution, more people in close proximity means that pollution gets magnified.
You may be surprised how many car modders there are. OBD-II makes it easier, not harder, to make cars pollute to high heaven, because there is no more sniffer and visual test. Just plug in the device and check for passed monitors. Well, if you've told HAL to report everything is A-OK even though you have an engine that idles like a clothes dryer with a bowling ball in it, then it will pass an OBD-II test just fine...
I know how to program an A-OK OBD-II device, but I can imagine that anyone who went public with it would get sued into oblivion on short order. I've never seen one on the market. More likely people are turning off the errors, which gives a different return to the reader than "monitors ok". Whether that gets noticed during the inspection is a different matter.
OBD-II is actually a pretty good setup. The cars are a lot smarter than you might think, even waking up in the middle of the night to run diagnostic tests. If they say you're good, then (assuming no shenanigans) there's no need for a sniffer.
I agree that we're seeing diminishing returns on emissions regulations, and it would actually make it a lot easier for people like us to offer CARB-legal parts to newer cars if the standards would sit still for longer. But it's not just car hobbyists doing this. Diesel DPFs are really expensive and will fail if you (ab)use them in certain ways. It's tempting to buy a cheap tuner box and just turn it off instead of replacing the part - the difference in cost is about an order of magnitude. A bad cat on a gas car is similar - but both that DPF and that cat make a major contribution to the emissions control of that vehicle.
In reply to Knurled. :
Understood, but the rest of the world doesn't have as many cars as the US.
Show me in pounds or tons for the population, the number of people that mod cars, and the differential increase of that population against the total.
"When we started" is a bit of a straw man, given the modern controls. That those controls were necessary isn't in doubt, but the changes that resulted should extrapolate to what might be allowed now.
The principle applies to such things as back up cameras. They're mandated now, but it solved an infinitesimally small problem (at least as the rationale I recall justifying their mandate - death of small children in back up accidents). And if the idiot that almost hit me backing out while using his camera because it was a corner angle is any indication, it'll still happen, but I digress.
MadScientistMatt said:It looks like the main thing that got Derive in hot water was offering tuners that would let you pass an OBD2 test with a lot of emissions equipment removed.
We've been putting a bit more emphasis on how MegaSquirt products are not street legal, unless you've got something old enough to predate the Clean Air Act, and being very specific that there is no way one is going to pass an OBD2 test.
I have gotten more than one MS equipped Pre-OBD2 car through smog testing here in Oregon.
With the MS out on the floor mat and an computer running TunerStudio open on the passenger seat!
In reply to bentwrench :
As have I, both of my Porsche’s we’re running aftermarket ECUs. The 79 924 has MegaSquirt which replaced Bosch CIS. The 88 951S had Wolf3D which replace Bosch Motronic and was older and more touchy to tune than MegaSquirt.
Both passed with flying colors. The 951S ran pig rich nearly all the time though, so I cleaned up the idle for the test, but given the high strung nature of a 2.5L running 18+psi, I put it back to near eye-watering levels of fuel usage. The 924 ran so poorly under load with the ITBs that it was dangerous to try and accelerate onto the freeway with it. Idled like a champ though and I could putter around town with it.
of course, both had good cats and tunes that were clean at idle. They still would be federally illegal, but I wasn’t making money off of setting them up that way or modifying other cars in a similar fashion for money. I was also very aware that if a smog station person were to get interested, I’d likely have to make changes to play by their rules.
bentwrench said:MadScientistMatt said:It looks like the main thing that got Derive in hot water was offering tuners that would let you pass an OBD2 test with a lot of emissions equipment removed.
We've been putting a bit more emphasis on how MegaSquirt products are not street legal, unless you've got something old enough to predate the Clean Air Act, and being very specific that there is no way one is going to pass an OBD2 test.
I have gotten more than one MS equipped Pre-OBD2 car through smog testing here in Oregon.
With the MS out on the floor mat and an computer running TunerStudio open on the passenger seat!
Two things, though- on opposite sides of this argument.
1) setting up any aftermarket ECU to run well WITH catalysts is reasonably easy. Not great, but well.
but
2) the sniffer tests in most states are generally useless, relative to what the car had to originally pass.
So while you may be right, it's also a qualified right.
In reply to OldGray320i :
The change in emissions really depends on what they are taking out.
If they are taking out the catalyst system, it's not doubling, it's closer to 20-50 TIMES worse. And on some cars, even close to 100x worse. That's how much the catalyst does. So depending on what you do to defeat the control system, you can do something as minor as double, or it can be double magnitude worse. (BTW, the OBDII trigger limit is actually 1.5x the standard- which is generally more than what the car originally put out- so most of the time, when you see the Check Engine light turn on, the car is likely close to 2x what it originally was).
Taking out the PCV system is similar- as circulating that is roughly worse than an uncataliyzed engine- again, somewhere between 20-100x worse than it was originally.
And it does not take that many cars to take the improvement we have seen and either stall it or reverse it.
I see this data every day, and know the effectiveness of emissions devices. It does matter. And given the risk, that's why the law is enforced as it is. It's also important to note the significant increase of miles driven of daily driven street cars over race cars- which is why there's an exception.
It's very easy to set the readiness monitors to "ready - not reporting" in HP Tuners. That'll pretty much get you past most of the OBD2 scans, unless the place clears the monitors and then cycles the key to recheck them.
Here in Colorado they don't do sniffer in the tail pipe. New cars don't get tested at all for 7 years. So anyone can do anything they want in that period without worry. Then the next 5 years its an OBD2 scan, after that they get run on the rollers on a real drive test.
So all in all, it's a pretty easy test for quite some time. Additionally only the "Front Range" so Denver to Ft Collins gets tested, anywhere else in the state there's no testing at all....
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