[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published February 20, 2019]
©2019
When the service garage manager told me my car failed its smog test
because I don’t drive on freeways enough, I was sure I was being scammed. I’d
had this experience once before years ago at the now-defunct service station on
Pearl and Eads who told me my five-year-old Camry would need $800 in repairs to
pass. Dubious, I took it to another garage and it passed without a hitch.
This time, the service manager tried to explain to me that their test
machine had failed my car on something called OBDII. As best as I could
understand – and frankly, I couldn’t understand it at all – when I’d had my
battery replaced 18 months earlier, it had re-set a thingamagiggy (not its
technical name) that was now causing this problem.
The solution, he said, was that I needed to get the car out on the
freeway and drive it around for a while (20-100 miles, he guessed) then bring
it back in for a re-test. It sounded so ludicrous that I may have said unkind
things. In my mind, I could hear these guys laughing hysterically and saying,
“She actually fell for it!” I made a mental note to AARP: Alert seniors to the
new Elder Battery/Smog Test Scam!
A minor detail with this solution is that I do not drive on freeways.
As in ever. Hence, my car doesn’t either. I was a reluctant freeway driver
even before a seriously impaired driver slammed his Mercedes into our car at 85
miles per hour. A blow-out at 70 miles per hour on I-5 on Christmas Eve in 2015
clinched it. My 6’3” husband avoids driving my car as well as no matter how
low and far back the driver’s seat is set, his head is wedged against the roof.
But Olof looked up this OBDII thing and amazingly, it’s a real thing.
The internet was replete with minutely-detailed instructions on how exactly you
should drive your car to fix this problem. But being the internet, absolutely
none of those instructions agreed. It reminded me a lot of recipes for
perfect popovers, none of which agree either.
But just so you don’t
think I’m making this all up, Olof has complied with my request to explain it
to us:
Inga, my understanding of your smog certificate fiasco follows:
As you are well aware, the state of California has grown concerned about smog, particularly in Southern California. In response they set limits as to the amount of pollutants that a car can emit and still be licensed. Hence the requirement to periodically take your car to an inspection station and have its exhaust analyzed.
However, our government friends determined that these stations could not economically test the car in all operating modes, so they forced car manufacturers to put in sensors that measure pollutants at speeds and operating conditions that the inspection stations can't observe. These sensors connect to an onboard computer which stores their results; probably average values for a past period of time, or perhaps the latest values.
This computer is an electronic device and needs electrical power to maintain its memory. Normally that's not a problem as the car's battery provides more than enough power. But you had the battery replaced which momentarily deprived the computer of power and wiped its memory clean. This would also not normally be a problem, but the sensors aren't active at all times. Some apparently only work in specific driving regimes (e.g. speeds above 55 mph). Still not a problem normally because after a day or so of driving, all of those regimes should have been experienced, the sensors reactivated, and the computer updated with data. Only neither the State of California, nor the automobile manufacturers, anticipated granny driving during which the car never exceeds 25 MPH (except on La Jolla Boulevard, where speeds have been observed which, by all rights, should have activated the sensors).
The day after you berated the poor service station guys for not being willing to violate state law, I took the car for a spin up Highway 52 and drove it around near Convoy at various speeds. This was apparently sufficient to re-enable all the sensors and cause them to once again report data to the on-board computer. The next morning the car was issued its anti-smog certificate with no problems.
As you are well aware, the state of California has grown concerned about smog, particularly in Southern California. In response they set limits as to the amount of pollutants that a car can emit and still be licensed. Hence the requirement to periodically take your car to an inspection station and have its exhaust analyzed.
However, our government friends determined that these stations could not economically test the car in all operating modes, so they forced car manufacturers to put in sensors that measure pollutants at speeds and operating conditions that the inspection stations can't observe. These sensors connect to an onboard computer which stores their results; probably average values for a past period of time, or perhaps the latest values.
This computer is an electronic device and needs electrical power to maintain its memory. Normally that's not a problem as the car's battery provides more than enough power. But you had the battery replaced which momentarily deprived the computer of power and wiped its memory clean. This would also not normally be a problem, but the sensors aren't active at all times. Some apparently only work in specific driving regimes (e.g. speeds above 55 mph). Still not a problem normally because after a day or so of driving, all of those regimes should have been experienced, the sensors reactivated, and the computer updated with data. Only neither the State of California, nor the automobile manufacturers, anticipated granny driving during which the car never exceeds 25 MPH (except on La Jolla Boulevard, where speeds have been observed which, by all rights, should have activated the sensors).
The day after you berated the poor service station guys for not being willing to violate state law, I took the car for a spin up Highway 52 and drove it around near Convoy at various speeds. This was apparently sufficient to re-enable all the sensors and cause them to once again report data to the on-board computer. The next morning the car was issued its anti-smog certificate with no problems.
OK, so Olof fixed it. But on behalf of all the little old ladies and
freeway phobics in America, I protest. Or maybe it’s just on behalf of little
old ladies and freeway phobics in California. As the washer repair guy said
about the pathetically low water levels in my new washer, “It’s a California
washing machine.” I’ve already written about our California toilets, the
mandated low-flow ones you have to flush six times. Now I have a California car
which failed its smog test because I don’t drive on freeways enough.
Seriously, California.
No comments:
Post a Comment