Scrap Drive Clean.ca | From Drive Clean to Clean Wallet

ScrapDriveClean.ca petitions Ontario government to remove failed e-test program

thought you'd all be interested.

 

Right on!!

 

..ya right..(old news anyways,already posted).
If this gets tossed I am betting that something else will be implemented to suck money out of the Vehicle owner...like Plate increase.
It'd be nice though,I got an 88 that needs a "E-Test"..

 

I don't care about the e-tests either way (and the new rules are way better for us), but one thing has always made me laugh when the dealers complain about the new testing standard.

They bitch and moan about the cars needing to have all the readiness checks done before they e-test like it's the end of the world. Maybe if they didn't constantly let the batteries go dead while the car sat in the lot it wouldn't be such a big deal?! And then you know, you just know, that the person buying the car will have to replace the battery shortly later because it's been let go stone dead so many times. Sorry, little sympathy for the lazy dealer who then sticks the consumer with a dead battery.

 

you know the governments will never admit they're wrong and just get rid of it. it generates 30 million a year. they probably hoped we would just take the increased failure rate quietly like the huge pushovers canadians have become
its complete bullshit who cares about all the monitors being online, its an emissions test shove the damn sniffer in the pipe and if the **** comming out of the pipe is clean enough give me my damn sticker.

 

The emissions test was always BS. And yet people vote these politicians in power, and we have another thing we have to pay for which goes directly into their pockets.

I'm tired of this. I gotta register with an address that is out of jurisdiction of this drive clean crap.

 

Is it really BS? One poorly tuned or worn out car can put out more pollution - CO, NOx, than hundreds of other cars on the road. Maybe you're not old enough to remember the 70s or 80s, when it was common in major cities to have brown, smoggy skies - even in Calgary in the mid-80s, at 700,000 people when the population was barely half what it is now. I'm kind of glad our air isn't like Bejing's.

As far as the $30 million - isn't that the cost to consumers? Which would go to the shops? It's not like it's a big revenue item for the government, so that's not why they do it. Even if it is, $30 million isn't much more than a rounding error on the Ontario provincial ledger.

As Mr. Cake points out, this should be better for RX-7 owners - since our cars are non-OBII anyway, they just need to pass the tailpipe sniffer - not necessarily easy, but we have no worries about OBII trouble codes generating an automatic fail.

I'm not saying the new Ontario e-test isn't a bad test - obviously, it's generating way too many fails due to OBDII codes than due to vehicles failing because they are actual polluters. But like Misterstyx said, you might want to be careful campaigning against it, lest something worse replace it.

 

was it just from cars or all the factories that used to pump tons and tons of hydrocarbons into the air. how many poorly tuned cars does it take to equal the emissions from one of the thousands of nuclear bombs the usa has set of in the last 80 years. if cars were really the major contributors and the emissions testing helped clean it up, then why arent the provinces and states that never had any testing still smothered by a cloud of smog?

 

Yep, old enough to remember the 70's and 80's.
And no, I'm still very much against government crap. This drive clean thing was always bs. Everyone knows this. And yet we still allow the government to push us around.
C'est la vie I guess.

I'm with fc3sdrift on this one.

 

Calgary doesn't have much in the way of manufacturing, yet used to have heavy smog in winter - mostly from vehicles. It was rarely seen on weekends. But it's started to make a comeback - I have to think the combination of population, and that a lot of people here mod their diesel pickups to dump in a crapload of fuel and boost, and they smoke like a tire fire. So yes, vehicles are big contributors generally, and in urban areas, are usually the largest source of CO, NOx, and HC particulates.

As far as nuclear weapons - they have zero HC, sulfates, particulates, or CO emissions, so we're good to go with as many as we like - as long as we don't go setting them off and incinerating whole cities at a time. Then the emissions really go up. So far, we've only done that twice, so that's small potatoes too.

Large industrial sources - coal-fired power plants, smelters, and so on have transitioned to much cleaner burning natural gas, or back in the 70s and 80s, were starting to be required to install scrubbers to remove CO, particulates, sulfates, and so on. It's a given that small engines generally are much less efficient than large, fixed installations - so while industrial sources are large, their emission levels are not usually linearly scaled up from small engines. And, as I pointed out, getting one poorly-running/worn-out car off the road or repaired can be the equivalent of literally hundreds of other cars' emissions. That's what the e-testing is supposed to do - get rid of the junkers and other heavy polluters that put out vastly more than their share of pollution. Unfortunately, modified 7's are likely to end up as heavy polluters, since rotaries have generally had trouble keeping up with contemporary pollution standards from the factory - certainly if you ditch the cats. I'm afraid I don't buy that you should be able to pollute as much as you want, and pointing the finger at someone else is a cop out.

 

I say scrap the petition. Drive clean will NEVER go away. Kyoto Protocol or political BS, it here to stay.

 

I can recall a number of times in the past 7 or 8 years that its been suggested by various sources that the Drive Clean program is going to be scrapped, it hasnt happened and I doubt it will until the last gas powered car leaves the road. I dont think cars are the biggest polluters as the government would like us to think though. I think more could be done about industry that generally use small engines, think lawnmowers and small gas and diesel powered equipment. Having been exposed to the diesel powered industry im really quite surprised what passes for current emission compliance in the small diesel and gas engine world. For example, a 3 cylinder industrial engine around the 30hp size is considered to meet current standards even though it belches black smoke under high loads while not a single bit of black smoke is allowed on a 100hp 4 cyliner. Dont get me started in small single and 2 cylinder gas engines.

And why do these industrial engines generally have looser emission standards than commercial (cars and trucks) engines? Because its too expensive to make them emission compliant and would cost the industry too much. Why is it acceptable for a 5-10 hp engine that runs for hours on end in a single location to have the same NOx and CO output as an engine that is producing 10 times more power in a mobile vehicle, according to current emission standard?