A bit of pain in the future for those of you in CA with older cars, and for the rest of you who don't live here, I guess you can be thankful. My CRX needs to pass smog tests this year and after a few pretests and troubleshooting, the cat needs to be replaced to pass emissions. That would be fine, but on Jan 1, 2009, the wizards in Sacramento passed a new law banning the majority of aftermarket catalytic converters. After Jan 1, a cat you can buy in the other 49 states cannot be sold to CA. Because of this, I went from buying one to fit my CRX that would have cost ~$275 to one at the dealer for $592. (and then add the new 10-11% sales tax, and the doubling of the registration fees to that!).
The new law also bans the sale of used cats, forces autoshops to verify that the old converter really needed to be changed, and the serial numbers logged. I'm all for clean air and can handle replacing the cat, but this seems pretty ridiculous. The link below is for the CA air resources board discussing the new law, and though I didn't spend more then about 15 minutes looking through there, the one thing I couldn't find is why they needed this new law. If there is some issue that the aftermarket cats do not have the quality the OEMs ones do, then the car wouldn't pass the emissions tests. Seems to me, another idiot on the state's payroll decided to create a new law that costs the tax payers more money, creates more govt spending enforcing therse new laws, and does nothing.
Thought I needed to vent some anger (or need to move soon), so thanks for reading.
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/aftermk...ftermktcat.htm
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