Kalifornia strikes again... Jegs to pay $1.7mil

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

Why is it bad? Well, because most of us don't want to live in a real version of 1984 where big brother is always watching everything. Maybe you're fine with it, but we're not. If that is the utopia you desire, there are already places in the world like that. I suggest moving there.

You'd rather people die for air quality problems? 

You already live in a world that big brother watches over you- this is nothing new.

Again, without protections for PEOPLE, items will eventually have to be banned for killing too many people when that is not the intention.  Drugs can not be sold that harm you.  Electrical items can not be sold that electrocute you.  How is this different?

I don't have a problem with the general concept and enforcement of emissions.  To give you an example, I live in the great lakes region and our medium sized city is situation in kind of a bowl and it's humid here in the summer.  ~15-20 years ago we had smog for much of the summer, air quality improved and now we don't.  For people with breathing problems (like my wife) it's a game changer and it literally saves lives.

I don't have a problem with CARB fining Jegs for selling tunes, but I think it's poorly written and enforced legislation to care about air intakes, throttle bodies, exhausts (other than cats), etc.  I agree with the suggested approach to administer emissions tests of modified cars and let the owners prove they are compliant.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

Why is it bad? Well, because most of us don't want to live in a real version of 1984 where big brother is always watching everything. Maybe you're fine with it, but we're not. If that is the utopia you desire, there are already places in the world like that. I suggest moving there.

Ironic that Alfa is the one defending the place as it is and you’re advocating that it change yet telling him to move if he doesn’t like how you imagine it to be.

In reply to alfadriver :

we area on two different planets. I am for personal liberty, self preservation and personal responsibility. Darwinian population control in my mind is a good thing. You are the opposite. You want the gov't to have complete control over the daily lives of its surfs, to control the daily movements, uses and purchases. We will have to agree to disagree. Like I said, if that is what you want, there are already places that have that. Please go there and enjoy your utopia and leave us to ours. 

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

...most of us don't want to live in a real version of 1984 where big brother is always watching everything. Maybe you're fine with it, but we're not. If that is the utopia you desire, there are already places in the world like that. I suggest moving there.

Go watch the first episode of Dirty Money, about VW's "diesel gate" to get an idea of how things would be without "big brother." Your idea of utopia is that everyone knows what's right and does it - where is this fantasy land?

In reply to dculberson :

I laughed when I read that as well. 

kb58 said:

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

...most of us don't want to live in a real version of 1984 where big brother is always watching everything. Maybe you're fine with it, but we're not. If that is the utopia you desire, there are already places in the world like that. I suggest moving there.

Go watch the first episode of Dirty Money, about VW's "diesel gate" to get an idea of how things would be without "big brother." Your idea of utopia is that everyone knows what's right and does it - where is this fantasy land?

That's funny. That was WITH big brother's control.

The point here is that a company is being responsible for how their products are being used. It sets a huge and dangerous precedent.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

In reply to alfadriver :

we area on two different planets. I am for personal liberty, self preservation and personal responsibility. Darwinian population control in my mind is a good thing. You are the opposite. You want the gov't to have complete control over the daily lives of its surfs, to control the daily movements, uses and purchases. We will have to agree to disagree. Like I said, if that is what you want, there are already places that have that. Please go there and enjoy your utopia and leave us to ours. 

You took his post way out of context. No where did he mention total govt control in our daily lives. 

The "for off-road use only" loophole has been nothing a complete and total crock of E36 M3 for a long time, and everybody knows it  The blame for this problem lies squarely on the shoulders of all of the irresponsible and selfish "enthusiasts" who engaged in the abuse of this exemption that was originally granted as a token of goodwill to the enthusiast community amid regulations that were tightening for just cause...Not those simply trying to prevent its abuse. Is it really surprising that their methods are less than accommodating, when they gave an inch and as a group "we" took a mile.

Of course I also blame SEMA for protecting this abuse that was inevitably going to be a short term gain but long term loss fot he enthusiast community, because nothing helps funnel more dollars their way than having long-term propaganda fodder about how our hobby is being 'attacked' by the government...Even if it was really us just shooting ourselves in the foot. 

Maybe if our culture was more self-policing, there wouldn't have been cause for intervention.  Maybe if our culture worked WITH those entities, rather than subverting them, we could have created solutions that would have benefited both sides.

THIS is where personal liberty ended, and self preservation and personal responsibility were SUPPOSED to begin...But didn't.

In reply to rslifkin :

Breathing is something we all do. Due to population density and terrain pollution hurts a lot of those on the coast. They make rules to protect their citizens. 

Seems reasonable to me. 

By the way nothing for off road use is prohibited.  Race cars can do whatever they want as long as they aren’t used on the road. 

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

In reply to alfadriver :

 I am for personal liberty, self preservation and personal responsibility. Darwinian population control in my mind is a good thing.

There's the fantasy land thing again. Smokers demanding their rights but don't pay for the consequences of lung damage. Motorcycle riders who demand their liberty to ride without helmets, but leave it to society to pay for the their brain surgery. What you're describing exists right next door to the NRA's fantasy land where everyone practices perfect gun handling, no one ever misses, and there are no accidents. Right.

In reply to Driven5 :

I would agree with that. Anyone who says they've never totally ignored the "offroad use only" designation for things, even something as simple as an LED light bulb or headlight housing, is lying to yourself. If you have truly never ignored that, then you are part of the .05% of enthusiasts that aren't part of the problem. The rest (myself included) are admittedly part of the problem. But I fully accept responsibility for the stuff I've put on cars in the past. I would never have the balls to blame the seller or manufacturer for selling me something I knew I shouldn't use on the street. But the other side of that is that anyone who thinks companies are going to do the morally responsible thing when money is on the line is living in a fantasy world.

In reply to Bob the REAL oil guy. :

OK Bob, if I’m up wind of your house and decide that I can make money burning tires to dispose of them, without government how would you peacefully resolve this issue?  

frenchyd said:

In reply to rslifkin :

By the way nothing for off road use is prohibited.  Race cars can do whatever they want as long as they aren’t used on the road. 

NY had an interesting one when they first started requiring CARB approved cats for replacements and not generic 50 state ones.  I dunno if it it's still the case, but when that first came into being, if you had an NY address, Summit (and I think a few others) wouldn't ship you a non-CARB high flow cat.  So even if it was truly going on a racecar, you couldn't buy the thing in the first place.  

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

 I am for personal liberty, self preservation and personal responsibility. 

And when large swaths of the population use the first as an excuse to infringe on the rights of others, by not engaging in either of the latter two?...What then?

What's being conveniently ignored regarding aftermarket parts is how non-trivial it is to confirm whether they're really clean or not. Proponents argue that "I put this aftermarket cat on and it passed the emissions test, so what's wrong with that?" The problem is that the emissions test takes only a few data points, leaving out 99% of all other driving conditions. Until a part is FULLY tested under all conditions, you, me, and everyone else can never claim it's just as good as the OEM parts.

Kreb said:

While CARB sucks in many ways, what sucked far more was to be more than a couple of miles inland on a summer day in the Los Angeles basin in the 1970s. As a teenager we used to take skateboarding trips down there. In Uplands, the skatepark was about half a mile from the base of Mount Baldy, which was gorgeous if you could see it - which we never could.  The routine there would be to skate for half an hour or so until the smog had you hacking so much that you couldn't skate any more. Then you'd sit in the shade, drink a coke till you could breathe again, after which you'd skate, hack up a lung, rinse, lather, repeat.  

I don't think anybody is arguing whether the pollution and smog problems were/are real in CA.

The question is more of whether CARB is actually a measurable improvement over 49-state emissions.

I still think the # of vehicle owners who are modifying their cars to any sort of measurable increase in pollution is well under 1%. There's orders of magnitude difference between somebody putting a cone filter on their car and stripping out the cats.

If CARB said 'your car must be below X pollution, otherwise we don't care what's under the hood' I could totally get behind it. They shouldn't care about anything but what comes out the tailpipe.

If you read the release, it specifically mentions "sale and marketing" of those products. If Jeg's was not marketing those products specifically as "Race Use Only" then they did, indeed break the law. $1.7 million isn't that big a fine for a company that size, and at least part of the money will be spent on beneficial projects instead of just paid to the government. 

Imagine that you live in cali and order a new full exhaust for your WRX from a company that shows nothing but pictures of it installed on cars on the street. You install it and it runs and sounds great. Now, next time you have the car emissions tested (because you are a gearhead trying to play by the rules and do the right thing) they tell you, sorry, that exhaust isn't CARB legal, you'll have to remove it. You're out $$$$, time, labor, and general PITA. I would be pissed at a company that sold me something and misrepresented where I could use it.  Now, IF the website/catalog/whatever clearly advertised "RACE USE ONLY IN CA" then that changes the legal standing. Without seeing the ads and parts in question, none of us know what really happened, and we're just having a circle jerk here.

I make cleaning chemicals for a living, and we deal with CARB and EPA regulations daily. They certainly over reach sometimes, and we get caught in the crossfire between different regulating agencies daily.  But the consequences of NOT having some regulatory control is far worse.

I'm sure Jegs lawyers considered the charges before agreeing to the fine.

At some point I think Jegs is responsible, seeing as they must know that the "for race cars only" labels are going to be ignored by most. Hell, I'm guilty. But aside from paying fines, what are they really expected to do about it? The only answers are either stop selling the parts to the public or go tell the govt. every time someone with a CA address orders a non-CARB part. 

I have no real problem with CA emissions laws, having lived there most of my life and still visiting frequently, but if a modified car passes emissions testing only to fail the visual inspection I think that is a bit of the bull E36 M3.

My vote is make Jegs pay the fine this time. They must have known that most of these parts would see the street.  Then get rid of the damn visual inspection. Worry about what is coming out of the tail pipe, make sure the car is actually safe (in CA there are no safety inspections, the visual inspections don't care if you have any brakes left or worn out suspension/steering components) and have a nice day. Enjoy the weather and the nice canyon roads.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

In reply to alfadriver :

Darwinian population control in my mind is a good thing. You are the opposite. You want the gov't to have complete control over the daily lives of its surfs

Just to reiterate, I'm not fully in favor of everything CARB does and it's probably outlived it's usefulness compared to federal regulations, but in a world of unrestricted air pollutants, how exactly do you know that you or someone you care about would not be negatively effected by air pollutants in their lifetime?  Limiting air born chemicals that negatively affect people's health is not a whole lot different than having laws (socialized set of generally accepted rules) and enforcement (socialized physical security and enforcement of property rights) which prevents your neighbor from dumping hazardous chemicals in your yard.  Be as individualized as you want, but the concepts of a law based society exist for a reason.  Based on your ability to participate on this forum, you don't currently live alone on an island, so you probably currently enjoy these benefits and you'll never have to find out if you measure up to pure darwinism.

In reply to Snrub :

Actually, the last few years I'd be perfectly happy living alone on an island. I'm about done with "society" and people in general.

life was so much better before regulations.  Like pre fda inspected meat or when ourvlife spans were 1/2 what they are now.  Or when rivers caught on fire. 

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

Yep. That was "Darwinism" at its finest...LOL!

I actually like the CARB EO process. It makes a lot of sense. Automotive emissions is a lot more complex than doing a single test of a hot car on a dyno, or even than keeping an OBD-II system happy. California could have said "no modifications to anything that can affect emissions" and that would have been that. Instead, they gave us the ability to prove that a modification does not affect emissions. Basically, put the part through the same tests the OEs have to pass and measure it. Then, if it doesn't change things, you get the EO and you're good to go. It's actually pretty logical.

I also understand why CA has the emissions regs it does. I've only seen the "after", but the air quality generally sucks. If you want to put that many people in a state, then you're going to have to come up with a way to keep them all healthy. Dirty air is really expensive to a society.

Yes, it's possible to make a part that doesn't affect emissions and save yourself money by not doing the tests. But without doing the tests, you can't prove it doesn't affect things. And on modern cars, it can be quite tricky to modify something without changing something else. OE engineers are good and under real pressure to come up with clean, efficient, powerful cars. Kinda like "fast, cheap, good", it's a tripod where it's quite easy to change one leg and mess up the others.

California has done the math and realized it's easiest to stop non-conforming products at the source. Either the manufacturers of the products - who may not actually do business in the state, which might make jurisdiction difficult - or the ones actually marketing and selling them. They've already hit some of the manufacturers. And now, with JEGS, they're going after the big distributors.

"Race car use only" is another thorny issue that the EPA and SEMA are wrestling over. Perhaps it needs to be made very clear when you're selling. Of course, if you're selling chip tunes that have a "towing" setting, it's pretty hard to explain how that's used in a race car.

We in the aftermarket are very aware of this. It's no coincidence that FM has been spending a bunch of money and time on getting EOs for as many products as we can. We label each part as to whether it's legal for use in CA or not on our website. It's not an easy or cheap process, but it's a sign of good faith and allows both us and our customers to be legal. Some are sticking their fingers in their ears and just hoping they won't get noticed as they shovel money into boxes, others are taking our route and doing the right thing. Vendors who do the former may not be around much longer.