“I remember CARB saying that they can lower the emission requirements of new cars but can’t change what the requirements were for old cars. (Basically, it’s not fair to try and make a car run lower emissions 20 years later than it had to pass when it was brand new.) I guess they changed their mind.”
Well it is true that probably 99% of the pollution from cars, come from cars more than 10 years old...so if you want to clean up the air, then you must go after those older cars. But until recently, California’s government was stuck between pushing for social justice (which, in this case, means giving ‘the poor’ a break on their emissions) and cleaning up the air. You can’t have both. So now they’re coming down on the side of clean air. For the people on that forum, they might want to do what a friend of mine here in Texas does - which is to keep a nearly new CC and O2 Sensor in his garage, and swap it in, just before inspection, and then swap it out right after. He says it works fine (those two devices can clean up anything coming out of an engine, providing the CC isn’t fouled)...a bit time consuming though.
most folks have neither the skills or inclination to fool with that.and the poor don’t have the $ to pay someone to do it.
if that “fixes” it and it passes the sniffer check, why swap it back again?