Comment by HPsquared
1 month ago
I could see a single "bad" ICE car being the equivalent of 100 "good" ICE cars. Even the VW emissions scandal (where the cars were still functioning as designed, just not as well as they should) had instances where pollutants were 35x higher than they should be. So I could see an emissions deleted diesel (of which there are many, i.e. catalytic converter and DPF removed) could easily have more than 100x the usual emissions of noxious substances. Maybe even more! Especially if (as is often the case) the DPF was removed because something is faulty on the engine and was overwhelming the capacity of the DPF in the first place.
You can smell these cars from halfway up the road sometimes, when they're 100 metres ahead.
I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I once read a claims that the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in California with their two-stroke engines are responsible for more nitrate and particulate emissions than all the cars and trucks in the state put together, even though by fuel burned the latter outnumbers the former by orders of magnitude. I could totally see a malfunctioning four-stroke ICE with dirty burns being worse than 100 maintained ones.
That probably explains why California banned the sale of gas powered leaf blowers, law mowers, and weed whackers in 2024. You can still use them if you have an old one or by one out of state.
And at the right time too. At almost every point before that, a gas powered engine was justified for duration and power, but the significant advances in both batteries and electric motors in the past 10-20 years have finally made them good enough that ICE tools are totally unjustified.
> the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in California with their two-stroke engines
What's the intended precedence in that sentence?
I ask because I've never seen a lawnmower (in the US) with a two-stroke engine. There are probably some, but they're not common.