Comment by hedora

It’s quite possible that the pollution controls on some of those engines wig out and turn the truck into a coal roller. Even with 10-100x fuel efficiency improvements, it could increase particulates, etc due to a bad fuel mix.

The real question is why they’re paying $100K per truck for a mobile smog test rig.

The test equipment can’t possibly cost more than $100K. That leaves $26.9M of “you’re doing something obviously wrong”.

My guess is that the regulations aren’t actually forcing the idiocy, or they are designed to subsidize emissions testers in some way. I’d guess it is the latter, which is just bad regulation.

Smog checks in California have been pretty poorly administered for years. For one of my cars, the lowered the nox standard until it would have failed fresh from the factory, then made me spend more than the car was worth on a special cat that reduced emissions by < 10%.

These days, cars continuously smog check themselves, so there could be a mandatory “send smog check report to the state” button on the dash, but that’d stop the gravy train for the smog test operators. At least they don’t make you smog test EVs, I guess.

With all the money that’s wasted on having stations that check dashboard error lights, they could install air and noise pollution monitoring sensors, and seize cars that have been modified to be non-street-legal. This would be stronger and better regulation than we currently have (less disruption to people obeying it, more bad cars taken off the road, minimal privacy implications for anyone in compliance with the law, and lower cost to enforce).

Also, it’d eliminate the need for the startup to test their truck retrofit, since the trucks would just light the stations up like a Christmas tree if there was an actual problem.