The EPA Isn't Killing Diesel–Tuners Are Killing Their Own Credibility
carsandhorsepower.com
carsandhorsepower.com
Congratulations on pointing out that people who "roll coal" don't make very good policy arguments, trying to extend the "teenager who whilst trying to be an asshole ran down several cyclists somewhat accidentally" attitude to everyone that holds an opinion is absurd, please stop.
You cannot have real political discourse about anything if your chosen strawman is the stupidest opponent you can find evidence for.
While technically true, that's not who the article is about. People who roll coal are not doing it because they have significantly more performance that way.
I had one of the "evil" diesel Jetta's and I miss that car. 40+ MPG, great performance up/down hills, not excessively expensive. In the settlement, I had to choose between giving the car up and accepting a to-be-announced retrofit.
It never rolled coal but the emissions were still a lie; This is where credibility is lost, not the EPA.
It is, in fact, what the article is about. The entire article is just denying the existence of a middle ground position or the fact that there's a constrained optimization problem here.
`Second, the idea that emissions controls "ruin performance" is outdated.`
`Either you care about performance within the rules, or you admit you don’t care about the consequences of your actions.`
`Tuners have two choices... Keep crying about regulations while clinging to an outdated, polluting past... [or] Embrace innovation—developing high-performance, emissions-compliant solutions that don’t sacrifice power for legality.` (wow, talk about a GPT-authored sentence)
Up here where I live there are many diesel pickup trucks that have been EGR deleted and several local businesses sprang up just to serve that community.
It was very common and still is common to be driving down the highway behind a truck that suddenly rolls thick black smoke on everything around it. Many of these trucks aren't driven by mechanical engineers as I suspect there is a small, insignificant population of that particular specialty locally. They are driven by young, dumbass children or inbred rednecks who bought the libertarian/fascist line about needing to own some libs or the line about the government needing to get out of people's lives and let everyone do whatever they want.
One day they will get their due. Instead of going after the shops that sell this bullshit, regulators need to use the traffic cameras and license plate scanners on every highway in Texas to build a database of vehicles and go after individual owners and businesses who sell and tune equipment or remove exhaust components. Maximize the fines and confiscate the vehicles until the owner pays for the vehicle to be brought back into compliance or back to OEM specs. Then require them all to have monthly inspections at their own expense for at least two years to verify that the vehicle remains compliant.
I've probably just made a couple of dumb suggestions in this post but these coal-rolling assholes piss me off.
americans are individualistic. you wont get very far by saying "do things this way I passionately believe in OR ELSE, you inbred redneck". they then do this to spite you "own the libs". better to say, "do things however you want, it's not for me to say how you live your life, but that would be cool if you did X because Y and I'm passionate about this because Z. both sides of the aisle are guilty of painfully enforcing their beliefs on the other.
We are talking about the long-term health/environmental effects of millions of vehicles after all, maybe they were part of science teams doing research on the topic? I mean, a mechanical engineer doing back-of-the-envelope calculations is better than some uncle on Facebook, but still...
Yes... most of the friends in question (MechEs, as I mentioned) work in power generation, petroleum engineering, etc. Not sure what your friend group looks like.
> We are talking about the long-term health/environmental effects of millions of vehicles after all,
If you're going to act like you're doing some kind of utilitarian calculation, you're going to need to do a more convincing job of recognizing this as a tradeoff space rather than seethingly appealing to "science teams"
My friends are more generally competent (and less harmfully biased) than the modal person writing emissions policy, yes.
A 2025 is probably something like 10x the cost too..