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you wouldn’t GameShark A CAR

In my country it's pretty common to remap and modify the ECU settings.

For €100 you can have someone remap the fuel injection system to give you more power for less fuel (VW are notorious for this, you can easily get 25% more power), or you can have environmental features disabled that will end up breaking such as EGR, DPF, AdBlue, etc.

Someone who does it is a friend of a friend, and he drives a Tesla, so I guess it's not a bad business to be in.

wouldn't an emissions inspection notice this or do they not do that there?

Probably it varies country by country, but I would guess that road safety rules have some common thresholds of parameters like emissions. And not enforce detoriation when compared to factory state. The latter is probably a natural phenomenon with wear.

I guess we need a licence for car ownership in addition to driving, and that should be a way of losing it.

On balance it's probably a good thing for people to be able to modify their cars. We wouldn't want to build a world where you're beholden to the whims of car companies on pain of having your ability to own a car revoked. That would be a recipe for abuse.

If people modify their cars in dangerous or illegal ways, that's presumably already a crime they could get their license revoked for.

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