Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

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I don't hate EVs. I do think the way emissions standards are applied to vehicles are very stupid and actually counter-productive. The grandparent to my comment makes good points about diesel vehicles, but it's not just diesel vehicles, it's also gas cars as well.

I own a small sports car. This car is designed to only run on 93 octane gas, and has three stages of catalytic converters due to emissions standards, as well as related sensors. Many parts of the US do not have 93 octane gas, only 91 octane gas, which is possible to run in the vehicle but causes it to run worse than it otherwise would and isn't great long-term. Additionally, it is extremely underpowered given its engine specifications due to the emissions controls.

If I were to illegally remove the catalytic converters and instead run resonators (for sound tuning and volume reduction) and program the ECU with a module to support using ethanol fuels, I would actually reduce the emissions output while ensuring I have effectively higher octane fuel and produce 30-40 more horsepower at the wheels. Yes, removing emissions devices can actually make a car /more/ efficient and reduce emissions if done correctly. Unfortunately, the EPA has decided that people that want to do this are horrendous criminals and any shop assisting them or importing parts is doing crimes, and has made it their mission to shut it down.

So the EPA and our stupid legislation ensures my car is less efficient, undergoes more wear, and sounds worse, in order to abide by emissions standards.

Both of the people who responded to my comment seem to have missed my point about ethanol being part of this. High-ethanol (E70 or higher) fuels have roughly half the emissions when burned that gasoline does, while having a higher effective octane rating. That said, from an energy density perspective their energy density is lower, so it requires tuning so the fuel injectors on your car inject more fuel volume at a given speed density (or other tuning method).

There's been multiple studies on this. From an environmental impact perspective, biofuels are generally considered worse than gasoline due to land-use, however at the point of use, when burned, they are massively cleaner than gasoline and don't produce the same quantity and types of byproducts. In point of fact, burning high ethanol biofuels without catalytic converters produces cleaner emissions than burning gasoline with catalytic converters. Also, my parent comment was not an argument against catalytic converters, it was an argument against the encryption of ECUs, banning of tuning components, etc. by the EPA in the name of emissions, when these things are necessary to convert a car that runs on gasoline to run on high-ethanol biofuels, which are better from an emissions perspective at point of use. You can use downstream high-flow catalytic converters with ethanol fuels for final cleaning, such as in the mid-pipe of the exhaust, but you cannot use them in the exhaust header itself as the temperature of the exhaust gas is significantly higher with high-ethanol fuels, which is part of why their byproducts are less emitting.

I don't know why EPA should care such people. Driving a car is a privilege. Also, net CO2 emission is decreased by bioethanol by theory, but it still emits toxic materials that should be caught by catalytic converters.

The catalytic converters reduce unburned hydrocarbons and reduce oxides of nitrogen. No amount of 'tuning' will every achieve that. So your statement on reducing emissions by removing the catalyst is provably false.

People under 60 have no idea how crappy the air quality was in the late 1960 through 1980. And it really didn't improve much until the mid 1990s, when most if the old cars finally aged out and left the road.

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