My BN1 is is California, so I follow this with great interest.
First of all, my BN1 at ~ 27 mpg gets better mileage than the current US
national fleet average, which means it produces less CO2 greenhouse gas than
the average modern car. So getting rid of the old cars won't really improve
much when it comes to reducing greenhouse gasses, especially for our
Healeys. This is your strongest technical argument against the green lobby
for getting rid of old cars like Healeys which get comparatively good
mileage compared to modern SUVs and muscle cars. They would do more
greenhouse good by getting rid of modern SUVs and Hummers, or any car that
gets less than 12 mpg.
Perhaps the legislative solution to all of this is to have an annual smog
exemption certificate that you can buy for say ~ $300-$500 a year. This is
expensive enough to make sure all of the junkers would be taken off the
road but for car enthusiasts would still pay the money to keep their cars on
the road. The other better option is to have a sliding scale of
registration fees that relates to the size of your engine, and make anything
more than 5 liters very expensive to register every year.
Before you flame me calling me a tax and spend liberal (which I'm not)... I
should say annual registration fees here in Hong Kong are between $700 and
$1,300 per year depending on the size of the motor in your car. Because
this is so expensive, it works wonders to get rid of all the old crappy cars
on the road... I'd say 90% of the cars in Hong Kong are less than 10 years
old...older than that and people just don't want to pay for the
registration, except for the 100 or so of us in HK with classic cars.
Of course, the other option would be if they just instituted an UK
style annual MOT safety certificate program... that would work wonders to
get rid of the junkers as well... and more importantly help it make it
easier for the cops to stop and impound the ~ 20% of rolling wrecks in
California that are driven daily on the road without registration or
insurance... by drivers typically without... green cards. Uh oh, now i've
just lit the powderkeg...
Best Regards,
Alan
'52 A90
'53 BN1
'64 BJ8
On 1/4/07, Len and/or Marge <thehartnetts@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> New laws for 2007 includes AB 32 It commits California to reduce
> greenhouse gases by 25% by 2020. I view this as an opportunity for those
> who would like to see ALL older cars off the road to again attempt to
> include older - including Special Interest/Collector/Hobby - vehicles in
> the SMOG check program. We have already lost the rolling 30 year old
> program. What will be next? Only due diligence on our part can help divert
> any such attempts.
>
> (The Other) Len
> Vacaville, CA
> 1967 3000 MKIII HBJ8L39031
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