SMOGGED!

The most common response to California Smog laws among car lovers is generally one of genuine sympathy. But here are a bunch of helpful folks in online forums like Rennlist or 924board or Pelican Parts.

There were lots of strategies like:

+ “Goto a county with lower requirements” – didn’t really explore this one.

+ “Find a smog tech on the forums” – quite a few seem genuinely helpful on diagnosing issues.

+ “Get a new catalytic converter” – expensive

+ “Come to Texas!” – maybe one day

Our goal is to meet the emissions requirements alongside our desire to remove all the carbon from this campaign or perhaps even the rather colorful life of the 924s (based on an estimate LCA).

We wound of settling on a strategy which involved talking with a few smog test businesses to determine who would retest for free or at a discount if failed first time around. Because the hard part was just getting baseline data.

Then went ahead and worked through the most common referenced items to save time and money and left open the option to get numbers and troubleshoot from there.

What is perhaps most interesting is that LLMs are trained on data from the forums, among other places. So below was the guidance from Claude.ai along with which pieces we did vs deferred.

TLDR the cat was empty. There was a newish looking box, but like a vacate snail shell…nobody was home. Hmmm. WA state ended their smog program in 2020, so not a total surprise. Also for Lemons purposes this obviously a safety, or public safety, expense.