It shouldn't apply to Opels. Everyone knows that an Opel on the road today was reBUILT after 1985

 

Good. It's about time these dangerous polluters are off the road.
I've been writing to the EPA for years to get this done.?

 

Happy April Fools Day!

 

Kyler: Well played!


But there is a But to consider......attempts have been made over the past 20-25 years to do exactly what your article states, considered at State and Federal level. Some of the veteran Opel and muscle car owners can back me up on this.

The group SEMA was formed by all the pioneering after market parts companies, banding together to enforce standards in both the equipment they make and act as a united group against tyrannical government intrusion in our car hobbies. Here's a link for their Sema Action Network....Link: SEMA Action Network (SAN)

As you will see there, your April Fools parody is not off target at all. Those attempts to confiscate and crush our hobby cars has already been made. If not for a group like SEMA and SAN, this site does not exist in the form it does, rather, it's just a storage site for pictures of old Opel GT's Manta's and Kadetts.

Mike

 

The issue surfaces in CA periodically.

 

That's why I chose this particular article. It's believable unfortunately.

 

Cash for clunkers?

 

..... when they pry the gear-shift from my cold, dead hand!

West Coast GT

 

This is already an issue in some large European cities. As I recall, cars of a certain age (and now they're trying to ban diesels!) are not allowed to drive into certain cities at all.

 

Can't say I've ever read about this as a general rule for older cars but it may be a locally enforced thing

In Oslo they're talking about banning diesel cars on days when the pollution is really bad, certain meteorological conditions during the winter makes the pollution particularly bad and some people with really bad Asthma and similar respiratory conditions can't leave their home

I haven't seen any figures lately but at some point the diesel to gasoline ratio in new car sales was 70/30 in favor of diesel powered cars. The modern turbo diesel is a fantastically fuel efficient thing and with diesel being 5-10% cheaper here a lot of people went down the diesel avenue. I bought my first diesel in 1998 or something and haven't looked back, a gasoline engine of similar size just feels absolutely gutless in lower revs and uses more fuel so to me the choice is obvious when it comes to my dd, my little 1250 cc diesel has more torque than my 2500 cc TR6

This of course is positive for the global environment too, if you believe that we at least add to global warming, as there's less "contributants" coming out of the tailpipe (no I'm not opening that can of worm, just mentioning it) but for the local environment the diesel can actually be quite harmful due to the particulates it emits, hence the proposed ban talked about earlier. They really didn't see this one coming and one way or another they need fewer people to buy diesels

It's odd really, I'm old enough to remember all the talk about about Smog and how polluted the inner cities were back in the day, and driving on the Autobahn there was little doubt just harmful lead additives in the fuel was to the environment as the trees that lined the Autobahn where completely gray or brown. Then the lead disappeared and we got catalytic converters and the air seemed to get much better, the forests got back on their feet again and the sun always shined, at least on TV, and yet here we are again, 40 years later with similar problems

It's weird really, if this diesel ban happens I'll be allowed to drive my 40 year old TR6 into Oslo on those days but not my almost brand new dd which exceeds all current emissions regulations

 

Sure these cars are polluters, but they have already paid there debt by being on the road for 40 years. The longer they are on the road the less pollution they contribute.

 

Hi,
That's exactly what I have been talking and writing about to the media here. Guess what ? Even the so called classic car aficianados only want to profit from the club members, not one squeak when the politicians wanted to scrap ANY car older than 15 years. I suggested in a letter to the editor that they should lead by example and scrap all the Rolls Royce Phantom Vs and Mercedes 600s that the government and rulers(we have 9 of them)have in their fleets. Then all the MGBs and Jaguar Mk.2s that are so beloved of our politicians that hate their colonial masters with a passion(only in parlimentary rhetoric). Letter was never published and when politicians figured out(took a while)that almost 2.8million VOTERS own cars older than 15 years it has been buried for the time being.
Here anyone younger than 35 believes old cars are dangerous and gross polluters and cannot possibly go around corners faster than their latest multivalve VVTTTiiii or whatever with skyactive or airmatic or 'magnet' suspension(don't ask u have to live here for a few years to figure that one). But I reckon if you take a 3 year old car and test it using a 4 gas analyzer the results would be shocking because of the maintenance. Many do not let shops replace airfilters, just blown it with airline and put it back, and fuel filters are 'out of sight, out of mind'. Oh and aren't spark plugs supposed to last like a million kilometers. At least I have got my close friends have all this 'routine maintanance' work done on their cars, one had not replaced spark plugs for 180,000kms because some idiot told her her car did not have plugs(it's a COP system, no distributor or HT wires).
Manta hardly covers 4-5000kms/year and the BMWs even less, 3.0Si only ran 1000kms last year along with the E12 525. And the Volvo 264 is not even taxed for use this year. So how much would old cars like that pollute?
New cars needs iron, bauxite and other ores to be mined, oil to be drilled for all the new fangled plastics, fabrics etc. Paints and other chemical finishers produced. But somehow it 'pollutes' less.

 

I knew I read this recently. Paris, starting next year....

Paris to ban all old cars from city limits starting next year | Hemmings Daily

 

That's a shame. It's a destruction of mobile history and art. The environmental impact of the small percentage of old cars is utterly negligible (at least here in the us.) I don't know anything about French gov, but I figure this is an effect of lobbying by car companies as it will increase purchases of new cars.

 

Our freedoms are at risk in many areas!

It's pretty sad the direction certain politicians want to take us in. This "war" on classic cars is echoed every month in my Cigar Aficionado magazine which is trying to salvage our right to smoke cigars, in the NRA publication I get where the right to own a gun being under attack is discussed continually, and even in the video game publications I read where the violence portrayed in games is considered dangerous leading some to want to ban them. If this continues I'll have no hobbies left as it seems everything I enjoy is bad for the environment, people, or both! I'm going to get in my polluting car, light up a cigar, throw my gun in the glove box, and play something really violent on my tablet...and love it! Here in Georgia, for the moment at least, we're still free.

 

Our freedoms are at risk in many areas!
Matt I noticed that our state government passed the fireworks bill.

Now we wont have to travel across the state line to get boom booms
Damn nanny that knows the best for US.

 

Great to hear Dan! I've been making a "pilgrimage" to Exit 1 just inside SC every December to get fireworks for our New Year's party for years. I guess I won't have to do that anymore!

 

Interesting discussion from what started as an April Fool's joke.?

 

Interesting discussion from what started as an April Fool's joke.��

Exactly, and it's actually a quite important discussion too

I'll try to leave the actual politics out of it but looking at from a philosophical POV there's a point where someone's freedom encroaches on someone else's basic rights so no freedom is absolute and freedom is only possible in combination with responsibility and respect

Since this is an automotive forum we can stay with cars

I love older cars, I can't think of anything that gives me the same amount of pleasure as I get from going outside, fire up my TR6 and take it for a drive on a warm summer day (at least not while still wearing clothes), if it was blue I would have named it "Tardis" as it travels through time and space as far as I'm concerned and I would have worn a bow tie, bow ties are cool

However, and I'm exaggerating here, me driving that polluting old car means that someone else's asthma may be flaring up and preventing this person from going to work for a couple of days, or if it's a child then not attending school or being able to spend time outside with other children

So the question then becomes;

Is my freedom to drive an old car more important than someone else's health ?

Is my freedom to drive an old car more important than society's need for people to go to work ?

Is my freedom to drive an old car more important than a child getting a proper education ?

Of course it's not and it would be rather silly to think that way, so my freedom comes with certain responsibilities, like not letting idle to end of time parked outside the neighbors kid's bedroom window knowing that he's got asthma even if it's technically parked on my property because then my freedom becomes a problem for someone else

Even here in Norway nobody's out to get rid of classic cars, and we absolutely love to legislate our way out of any kind of problem we see and it's actually become easier over the years to own a classic car, we are however making it more and more difficult for people to drive around in old clunkers that not only pollute like mad because they're poorly maintained, unlike actual classic cars, they're also most likely a traffic hazard because of lack of maintenance, again unlike actual classic cars. Sometimes new laws that are aimed at these old clunkers also affects us classic car owners but most times we're not the actual target.

Freedom comes with great responsibility and if more people understood this we could get rid of a TON of laws and regulations that complicates our lives and makes it more difficult to have some good old fashioned clean fun

The next time you see a rusty old beater spewing out tons of black/blue smoke and is barely able to be driven in a straight line, that's the person you should blame for the unfortunate laws that hamper your freedom to responsibly drive your properly maintained classic car wherever/whenever you like, it's needed because they don't care so someone had to come with a law against it.

That law doesn't really work of course as laws only work when people actually care .... but someone decided that something needed to be done, and since it was most likely a politician it had to be something he/she could brag about at the next election rather than coming up with something that actually worked, but there you go

Not that it actually bothers me or anything