What crime against the atmosphere could Toyota have committed worth $60 billion? That's how much the Justice Department was seeking in a lawsuit launched last week on behalf of it sister arm of the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency.
Did Toyota dump a load of fluorocarbons into the ozone hole? Has it been feeding refried beans to the national cattle herd?
These might have been $6 million crimes or even $60 million crimes. But $60 billion? To incur that kind of sum, the offense was not against the environment but against environmentalists, namely those in charge of the California Air Resources Board, the EPA's stalking horse in matters of auto pollution.
There is no impact on clean air involved here, zero. The issue concerns what is known in common parlance as the "idiot light"--the light on the dash that from time to time mysteriously instructs the driver to "check engine" or "service engine soon."
Since 1996, when the standards known as On-board Diagnostics II were fully phased in, the American driving public has become mass-conditioned to ignore this light. What in an earlier model might have indicated a serious maintenance problem was now programmed to illuminate only on evidence of a potential problem with the emissions system.
But nobody told drivers this. That was part of the plan.
One estimate by GM suggests that 99% of new car owners can expect to see at least one false warning in their first 10,000 miles. Even now, a group at Colorado State University is halfway through a federally funded project to show that the majority of drivers don't know what the light is for and generally ignore it.
A few may bring their vehicles back to their dealers, since most of the models are still under warranty. But more often than not the problem is nothing more serious than a loose gas cap--which allows stray gasoline vapors to escape. Another frequent cause is the failure of an oxygen sensor--a sensor that plays no role in safety or pollution control, but merely doublechecks that the controls are working properly.
As such, the post-1996 idiot light has successfully contributed little or nothing to pollution control. Yet, over the last couple of years, the government has brought enforcement actions against GM, Ford and Honda claiming they "illegally installed complex electronic devices in their automobiles that defeat the emissions control systems required by law" (as the Honda complaint phrased it).
Some half or more of the computer code in a new car goes to fulfilling the government's demand for full-time monitoring of the emissions control equipment to ensure performance within the narrow tolerances prescribed by California and the EPA. These devices can instantaneously measure the infinitesimal acceleration and deceleration of the crankshaft caused by every firing of each individual cylinder.
If a cylinder misfires causing an incomplete fuel burn, does it signal a real problem or were you just lugging the engine as you climbed a hill in the wrong gear? Did your tires slip as you bounced across some train tracks?
Honda's "crime" was to tune its OBD II computer to try to limit these false positives. Last year, it shrugged and paid $17 million in fines to California and the feds, and agreed to offer its customers two free emission inspections and repairs between 50,000 and 75,000 miles, plus a free oil change and tune-up between 75,000 and 150,000 miles.
In other words, California and the EPA used an insignificant quibble to force Honda to bribe its customers into coming to the dealership so their emissions could be checked. Honda put the cost at about $250 million over the coming decade.
Toyota's crime, based on tests of fewer than a dozen rental cars and cars owned by employees of the California Air Resources Board, was to have a system that did not shriek alarm at every loose gas cap or other momentary escape of fuel vapors.
Based on a Honda-style settlement proposed by CARB, this was a $100 million crime, until Toyota refused to play along. Saying "no" to the bureaucrats made it a $60 billion crime. Judicial review has become an exceedingly neuralgic subject for EPA. Two months ago its entire corpus of Clean Air Act reforms was thrown out by a federal appeals court. Message to Toyota and other automakers: Don't challenge our discretion.
But another subtext is the failure of the idiot-light approach to pollution reduction. It was a deliberate strategy to keep consumers in the dark about what the light really meant, because CARB and EPA hoped they'd think an engine was about to blow and bring the car in for a minor or non-existent snafu in the emissions control apparatus.
Instead, drivers, who can hear the engine and feel the car's performance and guess that everything's fine, disregard the light or even disconnect it or tape over it.
So muscling the car companies into offering free warranty extensions and free lube jobs is only a stopgap. Worse is coming. Even in the words of John Dunlap, CARB's outgoing chief, most of the juice has been "squeezed from the lemon." Nowadays, a low-polluting model like the Honda Accord LX is literally cleaner running down the highway than a 1970 model standing still, ignition off, with a full tank of gas.
Yet having reduced auto emissions about 90%, California is contemplating OBD III to tackle the last 10%. Under a much-discussed scheme, drivers would no longer be able to blow off an idiot light that much of the time is signaling a nonproblem. Cars would be equipped with transponders that would automatically rat them out to roadside or satellite sensors. In theory, the pollution police could even throw a switch and shut down your car if it was polluting too much (or driving too fast or parked in a handicapped spot).
Paranoid? The hot rodding community already reports that OBD computers will actually tune down the performance of improved engines after a few trips around the block so they perform within the putative air-quality specs. So far, the "limp home" mode programmed into car computers has been designed to activate only for genuine maintenance emergencies, but someday an apparent failure to meet EPA's and CARB's wishes may be enough.
How irresistible this would be to bureaucrats depends on the bureaucrats. Those now running the show seem to think Toyota should be put out of business for daring to dispute with them. It seems unlikely that an Al Gore presidency would make them more reasonable.
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