E-miss

Yesterday morning—before I heard about the phone mess—was really productive. Between 8:30AM and noon I:

• Changed my address at the DOL (Department of Licensing) after waiting in line for 30 minutes, despite showing up right at the opening time
  
• Tried to find the Comcast building in BFE, but couldn't because I forgot to bring the directions
  
• Opened a bank account at the credit union, which took way longer than I expected
  
• Drove back out to BFE with the directions to contact Comcast to send a tech to my house on Tuesday
  
• Went to the T-Mobile store to get my address changed because the online form was erroring on me
  
• Did a ton of shopping at Target
  
• Get my car emissions checked
  

I'm going to talk a bit about the last point.

I've never had to get a car emissions checked. To my knowledge, the only county in New Mexico to require a emiss check is Bernalillo, and I've never maintained a residence there. I did live in North Carolina and in DC for a bit each, but kept my NM registration both times because it was only a summer thing.

So this is a big first for me.

It turns out that the emissions center in Redmond is pretty damned sweet. They had four dynos, and even on a Saturday, three of them were operating.

While I was there, I saw some lady drive off the dyno with the exhaust clip still in her tailpipe. Brilliant.

I also saw some sports-player-looking guy drive up in a yellow NSX and get yelled at a bunch of times because he wasn't paying attention to the station operators. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera and didn't realize I had a cameraphone until he had pulled out of my view.

As always happens, the attendants were most amused at my hail-damaged car. I'm starting to get sick of telling the story, actually. But whatever, back to the real point.

Emissions checks are done, to the best of my knowledge, via two methods:

• A treadmill test, where the garage hooks up an exhaust sniffer and a spark plug reader wire and makes you do a driving simulation while on the dyno. These are really amusing at this test center, because it's all computerized—it's a bunch of Windows software that looks like a driving game...but without a view out the window. It's all dashboard. The idea is that the software tells the driver approximately how quickly to run the engine, but that the sniffer computer really just runs in data-collection mode to watch the revs and the gas counts. If I'm correct in this, there's no presumption that the driver is running the vehicle at the correct speeds. I've only heard all this through rumor mills, though.
  
• The second way to get these numbers is to simply ask the engine computer. Most cars manufactured after 1997 or so (and I could be wrong on this date) talk a well-documented diagnostic language called OBD-II (On-board Diagnostics, aye aye). There's a standardized data port under the steering column that the shop folks hook a scan tool up to so they can pull the correct codes off the engine computer. Because the engine computer has direct access to the O₂ sensor and the misfire counts, it can tell the emiss computer how things are going.
  

But doesn't this put the responsibility for accurate reporting into the car owner's hands? Yes. Does it really matter? No.

There are so many ways of getting around these tests that it really doesn't matter if one or two people can modify the engine computer so it reads funny. Most people I know would simply temporarily reinstall a factory catalytic convertor if they had removed it for performance reasons. Additionally, the stock computers have enough diags built into them that simply flatlining something like the O₂ output to some arbitrary low-emission voltage will cause the computer to flag an error. The systems are generally smart enough to catch failed or tampered-with sensors.

So there we go. The bonus here was that I didn't have to dyno the car. The downside was that I didn't get to dyno the car.

I'm unsure of what they do with pre-OBD-II cars that are unable to be dyno'd. Something like my 1991 Eagle Talon, for example, wasn't equipped with emission-reporting hardware and the emissions station didn't seem to have a full treadmill or sliding dyno to accomodate the all-wheel-drive. That's probably a good thing, too, because those cars are ripe for nutty mods.

Just so we're clear, here, my car passed on the first shot. Unlike me.