That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.
When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:
The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:
- people circumvent rules and go criminal
- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist
- sections of an economy die
- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
They find that $27 million in regulatory cost is a huge burden.
But I think if their product is successful it seems like it could be the kind of thing that a large percentage of semi trucks install.
If even 10% of semi trucks purchase the product, $27 million is a drop in the bucket.
Instead of bitching at the world over regulatory costs, OP should bitch as his investors for not being generous enough. Or maybe his investors should be firing him for failing to account for regulatory cost and time.
And all this bitching is happening despite the fact that he was successful in having the regulatory agent expedite the process. 14 months to get a brand new instrument of this sort approved doesn’t seem crazy to me. It seems quite in line with the estimated time needed for a company like Toyota to crash test and certify a new vehicle model with the various emissions and safety agencies.
If OP would like to move faster they need to get out of the sort of industry that makes products that can very easily kill people.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
Whether any particular regulation is necessary or onerous needs more detailed examinations, and it's easy to say "just have the regulations be as simple as necessary to protect us", but I'm arguing we've gone a little far with zoning regs and studies so that we can't build things as well as we used to. You could also argue that bodies are using these environmental regulations for their own purposes, like keeping property values high or protecting their other investments instead of actual environmental impacts?
(We can also try and spread regulations down the outsourcing chain, but I think that's difficult for other reasons.)
Done, fixed the loophole.
But I think that overall the process is not anywhere near as hard as you say it is. Corporations use purposeful, tactical ignorance to avoid regulations.