Yes, the sales of little Japanese Kei trucks (it’s pronounced “kay”) were up in 2023, one reason they have been getting a lot of attention from the media. The compact haulers, built to conform with Japan’s keijidōsha class of light vehicles, are practical as well as cheap and charming, so smitten American buyers have been importing them from their home markets at a higher rate. But we should keep things in perspective: According to the Japanese Used Motor Vehicle statistics, 7594 Kei trucks were imported into the U.S. last year. Ten years ago, before many of these Japanese market vehicles met the 25-year age limit to legally import into the U.S., that number was 797.

Meanwhile, Ford sold 750,789 new F-150s in 2023. Those who suggest that the backlash from state governments seeking to keep Kei trucks off the road is even partly motivated by the desire of manufacturers of full-sized pickups to keep the market for themselves, a view that has also been represented in the media, are probably incorrect.

Governments keeping them off the road is the other reason the tiny, right-hand-drive Kei trucks have been in the news, and we blame Rhode Island. While the federal government writes the rules controlling the importation of foreign market vehicles like Kei trucks, it’s up to individual states whether or not you can register and drive them on the road. According to multiple sources, Kei trucks are street-legal in 19 states. But in Rhode Island there are only 30 or so Kei trucks on the road so, as they’ve done in many places, Kei trucks have sort of driven under the radar when it came to the law.

Until this happened, as told last month by the Providence Journal: “Imagine this: You import a mini-truck from Japan after calling the Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles and being assured that you’ll be able to register it here. Several years later, you receive a notice from the DMV: The Japanese mini-truck’s registration has been revoked, and you’ll need to hand over the license plates.”

One of those owners was a constituent of State Senator Louis DiPalma, who began asking questions. Apparently, the state DMV had, since 2021, been re-evaluating its decision to issue registrations for Kei trucks based on existing law, and recently started demanding that owners return their license plates.

Publicity ensued, and the story was picked up by a raft of media sources, and officials in other states began asking questions about what their DMVs were doing about the danger represented by allowing Kei-sized vehicles on the road. Citizens began picking sides, and the next thing you know, outlets like NBC News and The Economist are reporting on the Kei kerfuffle.

And the whole mess is confusing. In Wyoming, you can drive your Kei truck on any road but an interstate highway. In Georgia, the Motor Vehicle Department conclusively insists that Kei vehicles “are not ‘street legal.’ Kei vehicles are barred from titling and registration.” That said, “…both customers and county tag offices have been confused by the title and registration laws relating to these vehicles. Due to this confusion, certain customers have successfully, albeit unlawfully, had their Kei vehicles titled and registered in Georgia.” Gee, whose fault is that?

Angry Kei truck owners have pointed out that motorcycles and scooters are allowed on public roads, as are hundred-year-old, 20-horsepower Ford Model Ts: Are they any safer than a Kei truck? In some states, the battle over Kei rights is getting downright contentious. Kei truck owners are banding together to advocate for fair treatment; the Texas Kei Vehicle Advocates, for example, report that they’ve already been successful in getting the state to reverse its ban on titling Kei trucks. A memo issued April 4 by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles said, “The department has revised the titling and registration requirements for these vehicles. Effective immediately, mini vehicles are required to be titled and must be registered if operated on public roadways.”

This cultish American enthusiasm for Kei trucks likely calls for an explanation. While we are talking about the tiny, single-cabover pickups or microvans that you’ve likely seen, say, doing maintenance on a golf course, “Kei” refers to more than that.

Kei is short for kei jidōsha, which is Japanese for “light motor vehicle.” A vehicle that is considered a Kei—and this has changed over the years, dating back to 1949—is, since late 1998, the following: Has an engine no larger than 660cc (about 40 cubic inches); no more than 63 horsepower; is no longer than 3.4 meters (just over 11 feet), and no wider than 1.48 meters (just under five feet). By comparison, the 2024 Nissan Versa, one of the few remaining small cars sold here, is 14.7 feet long and has 122 horsepower.

Since—obviously—the tiny Kei is not built to the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, only Kei vehicles that are older than 25 years can be imported into the U.S., because vehicles that elderly aren’t subject to FMVSS. That’s why the newest Kei vehicles you see for sale in America are typically 1999 models.

There are also Kei cars, including some sporty ones like the Honda Beat and Suzuki Cappuccino convertibles, and the Autozam AZ-1, built by Mazda and featuring gullwing doors: Those three are especially appreciated by American collectors, and quite a few have been imported. Decent Beats and Cappuccinos start at under $7000, while the rare Autozam AZ-1 starts at about $12,000, and can climb to over $30,000.

But it’s the Kei truck that is pulling in the (relatively) big numbers, and there are many companies in America that want to sell you one. Among them is Japan Car FL, based in Oldsmar, Florida, just south of Tampa. They have been importing JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) vehicles since 2018. The small, family-owned company advertises that they are licensed, bonded and insured, which is important in the JDM world, because not every company is.

Among Japan Car FL’s Kei vehicles is a 1999 Honda Acty Kei truck with four-wheel-drive, air conditioning and custom wheels for $10,850, and an air-conditioned 1999 Subaru Sambar Classic Kei microvan for $12,250. Each, says Japan Car FL, “comes with a clean Florida title, and is ready to be driven home on the day of purchase.”

While Japan Car FL handles all types of JDM imports, the business is driven by Kei trucks and microvans, said owner Lana Kashchuk. “There has been an increase in queries as they become more and more popular. It’s the top seller.”

Buyers vary. Some customers use them for work—Kei trucks are affordable, maneuverable, and their small engines are easy on gas. Many have six-foot beds that rival bigger trucks in cubic-foot capacity. “We have a lot of small business owners who buy them for tree-trimming, pool service, that sort of thing. But we also have customers who use them instead of golf carts locally to take them shopping or to Home Depot, or they drive them on weekends to go to the beach,” Kashchuk said.

There’s no problem in Florida—for now, anyway—to get them registered and tagged. The state now officially refers to them “mini trucks,” for use on roads where the speed limit is 35 mph or less. “But at the same time they are not branded as ‘low-speed vehicles’—they are not golf carts, so they get a regular tag and a regular title,” she said. “We have a lot of customers who aren’t having any problems or issues because they have a license plate like any other car, and they have a title like any other car, but it says ‘MT’—mini truck.”

Modern Kei trucks and microvans have no problem keeping up with the normal flow of traffic—that 1999 Subaru Sambar Classic, for instance, has 54 horsepower, and is good for 70 mph. Yes, they may technically be limited to roads where the speed limit is just 35 mph, but many traffic officers will look the other way as long as a Kei isn’t holding up the show.

As in most states, you can’t register a vehicle in Florida without proof of insurance. You can insure Kei trucks, but you may have to shop around for an agent familiar with the category, Kashchuk said. “It all depends on the agent. He or she might be confused about the shorter VIN number—because it isn’t the usual 17 digits and letters like a typical U.S. car, and because they may have a model name that is not familiar to them, not in their system.” As far as financing, Japan Car FL works with several companies that make loans on Kei trucks.

Even as states struggle to decide exactly what a Kei truck should—or should not—be allowed to do, there will likely still be a market for them, if for no other reason than because they are reasonably affordable. And cute.

Oh, and what’s happening in Rhode Island, where this confusion arguably began? Senator DiPalma is co-sponsoring legislation that would restore the ability of Kei truck owners to register their vehicles, and get license plates. That’s the good news. The bad news for Kei lovers: The new law would only apply to the 30-odd Kei trucks that are already on the road there, for use “until they can’t function anymore,” DiPalma said. There is no provision for adding any new Kei trucks to Rhode Island roads.

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Screech!

That noise you heard today was the Biden administration trying to put the brakes on the sale of Chinese EVs in the U.S. by quadrupling the existing tariff from 25 percent to 100 percent. The White House has also slapped a 25 percent tariff on Chinese-made batteries that are used in electric vehicles. The tariff was previously 7.5 percent.

As he announced the EV tariffs, President Biden accused China of unfair labor practices. “It’s not competition. It’s cheating,” he said, during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.

So what will be the immediate effect?

“It’s not going to make much of a difference at the moment,” said Sam Fiorani, vice-president for global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions. “The current level of tariffs was already preventing most vehicles from coming in from China, and raising it isn’t going to make much difference. There are some companies in China that are targeting the U.S. at any cost, and it’s likely their plans will be delayed as they find alternate routes. But in the near term, there will be little to no effect.”

“Alternate routes” could be assembling vehicles outside China, and then importing them to the U.S. “Presuming the government doesn’t find some way to prevent Chinese-branded vehicles from coming in, they are likely to find factories in Mexico or South Korea or some other friendly nation in order to bring their vehicles into the U.S.,” Fiorani said.

The added tariff on Chinese-made EV batteries may be an issue for U.S. manufacturers that use them, which includes Tesla and Ford. “There are a number of vehicles that are using Chinese batteries,” Fiorani said, “and it will hamper the profitability of those vehicles, and potentially speed up the production of batteries sourced from other countries.”

Chinese-built electric vehicles may not be an immediate threat to the U.S. automotive industry, but in the future, that may not be the case. An Associated Press story was distributed May 13 with this headline: “Small, well-built Chinese EV called the Seagull poses a big threat to the U.S. auto industry.”

The story is about a car manufactured by the Chinese company BYD, which stands for “Build Your Dreams.” The Seagull sells for about $12,000 in China, has a range of 252 miles, and is available with six airbags, disc brakes, and electronic stability control. It has “American automakers and politicians trembling,” the story says.

A company named Caresoft Global, which does automotive benchmarking, imported a BYD Seagull and dismantled it at their Livonia, Michigan, facility. The company president, Terry Woychowski, was so impressed with the quality of the Seagull that he told AP it should be a “clarion call” to U.S. manufacturers. “Things will have to change in some radical ways in order to be able to compete,” he said.

A Reuters story cited federal data that said only four vehicles presently sold in America are made in China. They are the Lincoln Nautilus, the Buick Envision, the Polestar 2, and Volvo’s S90 sedan. Polestar and Volvo are “affiliates” of Chinese automaker Geely, the story says. Geely also has a controlling stake in Lotus and multiple other brands.

We’ve tested the China-built 2025 Volvo EX30, a small electric SUV that was supposed to come to market in the U.S. by the end of this year at a base price of $36,245. No word yet on how Volvo is reacting to the new tariff. The company will build the EX30 in a plant in Belgium beginning in 2025, but early models will come from China unless Volvo’s plan changes.

Make no mistake, said analyst Fiorani: Tariff or not, “The Chinese are coming. It may take a third country, but the U.S. market is so desirable by any nation whose economy relies on the automotive business. These vehicles are going to find their way here.”

That’s because America is “the goal market” for the Chinese, Fiorani said. “To bring a vehicle into the U.S. shows that you have made it.”

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This may come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who like to patronize your neighborhood pizzeria, but actual Italians—the ones who live in Italy—are a bit sensitive about the use of “Italian Sounding” brand names for products that are not actually made in Italy. Their government is, anyway: A consumer protection law passed there in 2003 that makes it illegal to give misleading indications of the geographical origin of products. Italy has even taken the issue of “Italian Sounding” to the regulators of the European Union.

As a result of public pressure over that law from Aldolfo Urso, who holds the portfolio for the Ministry of Economic Development and Made in Italy (yes, that’s the ministry’s real name), Stellantis has announced that its all-new Polish-built EV will be renamed Junior instead of selling it as the Milano.

Last week, according to to the ANSA news agency, Urso said, “A car called Milan cannot be produced in Poland. This is forbidden by the Italian law that defined “Italian Sounding” in 2003, a law that states that you must not give indications that mislead the consumer. They would be fallacious indications explicitly linked to geographical indications. So a car called Milano must be produced in Italy, otherwise you are giving a fallacious indication that is not allowed by Italian law.”

On April 15, in response to Urso’s raising the issue of the 2003 law, Stellantis issued a slightly snarky press release:

During one of the most important weeks for Alfa Romeo’s future, an Italian government official declared that the use of the name “Milano”—chosen by the Brand for its recently unveiled new compact sports car—is banned by law.

The name “Milano,” a public favorite, was chosen to pay tribute to the city where our history all began in 1910. This was not the first time that Alfa Romeo has asked the public’s opinion when choosing the name of a car. It was previously done in 1966 with the Spider 1600 when the name chosen by the public was Duetto.

Despite Alfa Romeo believing that the name met all legal requirements and that there are issues much more important than the name of a new car, Alfa Romeo has decided to change it from “Milano” to “Alfa Romeo Junior” in the spirit of promoting mutual understanding.

The Alfa Romeo team would like to thank the public for the positive feedback, the Italian dealer network for their support, journalists for the enormous media attention given to the new car, and the government for the free publicity brought on by this debate.

With a unique story and an endless list of names to choose from, the name change was not an issue. Indeed, it was a pleasure to go over the list of names selected as favorites from the public’s suggestions, one of which was “Alfa Romeo Junior.”

Putting aside the question of whether or not the chunky little battery-powered compact crossover can accurately be described as a “compact sports car”, like the Milano name, Junior is part of Alfa Romeo’s heritage. After the success of the Giulia and its Sprint GT coupe iteration, for the 1967 model year, Alfa Romeo took aim at a younger audience when it introduced the GT 1300 Junior, a less expensive version with a smaller motor and fewer luxury bits.

It’s likely that Urso was using that 2003 law and the brand equity Stallantis has in “Milano” for leverage to get the multinational automaker to make more cars in Italy. His remarks about the Made-in-Poland vehicle were in the context of trying to keep Italy’s automotive supply chain healthy, and in response to Stellantis CEO Carlo Tavares’ remarks earlier this week that there could be possible plant closures if Chinese manufacturers started building cars in Italy.

Urso said that if Stellantis fails to build a million or more cars a year in Italy that it will be “inevitable” that an international car maker will step in to build cars there. The Italian government is already in talks with Tesla and three Chinese firms.

“We are working to enable Stellantis to produce at least one million vehicles in our country, Urso said. “To support the supply chain system, it is absolutely necessary to reach 1.4 million vehicles. If Stellantis believes it can do so, well and good, otherwise it is inevitable that there will be room for another car manufacturer or companies. We are a free market and we can and must incentivize Italian or foreign investment, obviously within the rules of the free market, and on this we are talking to those who consider building production plants in Europe.”

Urso jawboning Stellantis over the issue of the 2003 law was apparently not sufficient incentive to get the company to move production of the new vehicle to Italy.

It’s probably a good thing that we don’t have a similar law here in America about products’ “geographical indications” or we would have been deprived of such classic nameplates as the Chevy Malibu, Pontiac LeMans, or Ford Torino. Also, I wonder what those who crafted “geographical indications” legislation in Italy would have thought about more prestigious models like the Ferrari California and Superamerica not using Italian-sounding names.

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Hopping into the driver’s seat of a car is a freeing feeling at any age. A loose grip on the wheel and light touch on the pedals give us the capability to go just about anywhere when properly equipped—well, assuming your classic vehicle doesn’t have restrictions on usage based on your registration. Luckily, vintage car owners in Michigan are primed to enjoy this driving season and many more with a little more freedom thanks to the passing of House Bill 4183. Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the bill, which vastly expands the ability to use classic cars, into law on April 2nd with immediate effect.

According to the way the law was previously written, a vehicle with historic or authentic license plates could only be used for “participation in club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and similar uses, including mechanical testing, but is not used for general transportation.” The new legislation expands the definition of “exhibition” considerably. The full language reads:

Sec. 20a. “Historic vehicle” means a vehicle that is over 25 years old and that is owned solely as a collector’s item and for participation in club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and similar uses, including mechanical testing, but is not used for general transportation. For purposes of this section, use of the vehicle during the period from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day each year is considered an exhibition.

Plenty of drivers ignored the prior law, but there was always the chance that law enforcement would issue a citation for usage outside of the guidelines. That’s a worry no more, all thanks to an enthusiast just like you and me.

This law stands as a testament to what can be done by grassroots classic car owners, as it was not a lobbying group or organization that made this happen, but rather one person who thought the way the law was written was too much and decided to do something about it. That person was John Russell of Traverse City, Michigan.

“It’s been a long road, but totally worth it,” said Russell. It all started with a group being ticketed for participating in the Woodward Dream Cruise, as the informal driving event did not technically fulfill the letter of the law. The group protested and gained enough traction to amend the ruling in June of 2012 to allow unlimited use for the month of August.

Russell saw this as an opportunity. “That 2012 ruling made me call up my senator and ask why we had restrictions at all.” From there it turned into a letter writing campaign and spooled up into a full-scale lobbying effort before long. Despite some lulls and gaps in progress for the bill, John didn’t give up and before he knew it he was testifying in front of the Michigan state legislature, to which he said, “We aren’t asking for special favors, we are just asking to drive our cars. This is the automotive capital of the world. Why are we restricting people from driving to get ice cream in cool cars?”

Russell’s patience paid off. He got word on April 1st that the bill had passed, and had to reach out to his government contacts to confirm they weren’t pulling his leg. They weren’t, and that meant it was cause for celebration. It took years to get the ear of the right representative who would put together and introduce a bill, and then a full decade after that to complete the process to see said bill signed into law. Despite the wait, the timing is perfect, as owners are just starting to bring out their seasonally-stored vehicles and prepare to enjoy the driving season—now with a little extra driving.

With this win under his belt, Russell’s first question to State Representative John Roth and the bill’s other sponsors was “we can come back in a few years and ask for no restrictions, right?” Russell thinks he has the the right combination of evidence to make that happen, but in the meantime, those of us in Michigan are preparing for a celebratory drive this Memorial Day weekend.

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The new EPA proposals decidedly aren’t a 180-degree turn from the Biden Administration’s aggressive stance from last April that called for battery-electric vehicles to make up more than half of new-vehicle sales just six years from now, and two-thirds by 2032.

But Wednesday’s revision in those standards may indeed be a 90-degree shift from what Biden and the EPA wanted.

This new proposal now estimates that battery-electric cars, light trucks, and SUVs will make up 30 to 56 percent of new vehicle sales between 2030 and 2032, but even that may be ambitious unless cooling trends in electric vehicle demand warm up quickly. Though there are 83 battery-electric vehicles on the market, just two, the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, accounted for 57 percent of retail new EV registrations across the industry in 2023.

Critics of the new proposal, including the National Automobile Dealers Association, say that even the softened guidance is “too aggressive and far ahead of consumer demand.” In 2023, according to data released last week by the S&P Mobility research firm, battery-electric vehicles made up 8.5 percent of new, light-duty vehicle registrations in the U.S. last year.

As you’d expect from the other end of the environmental spectrum, anti-pollution advocates criticize the reduced target because of what it might do to the fight to against carbon emissions. This is despite the fact that the new EPA proposal would set tougher limits on tailpipe pollution through 2032, and enable manufacturers to use other clean-ICE technology rather than just add more battery-electric vehicles. The new regulations also give more credit to the plug-in hybrid’s ability to trim pollution.

The EPA’s new rule slow-walks last April’s stricter pollution standards from 2026 to 2029 while increasing them up through 2032, ending up very nearly where last April’s initiatives would have landed, assuming this strategy works. It is lost on few that the election of Donald Trump in November might well cause a major re-write of Wednesday’s proposals.

Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen advocacy group claims that this new proposal “falls far short of what is needed to protect public health and our planet. EPA is giving automakers a pass to continue producing polluting vehicles,” Public Citizen says. “The Biden Administration had the opportunity to shift the automotive industry away from a model that’s driving record profits for automakers while literally killing us, toward one that still provides strong profits but keeps the world safer for humans.”

As it exists, the EPA’s proposal allows a manufacturer to sell ICE products, BEVs or PHEVs in whatever combination it chooses, as long as it makes its numbers. According to the EPA, a manufacturer should be able to sell between 30 and 56 percent BEVs in order to meet its pollution requirements. The new standard is based on grams-per-mile of emissions, not on the powerplant used.

Bottom line, the 1181-page document that covers the Biden Administration and the EPA’s new proposals—the “Final Rule” for vehicles “that will phase in over model years 2027 through 2032”—deftly offers something to both sides: A pause in having to worry as much about the timeline for the integration of battery-electric vehicles in a down-market EV sales atmosphere; and increasingly tough pollution standards that will, by 2055, prevent more than seven billion tons of carbon pollution from reaching the atmosphere.

So neither side is happy, but both can declare a win.

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Los Angeles is a town with a well-earned reputation for a short attention span. You’re only as good as your last 90 minutes, goes the old saying in the movie business, and the hook is always waiting to yank off stage anything or anyone who isn’t killing it. That rule applies to race tracks, too. The Los Angeles Motordrome, a board track erected in 1910, lasted just three years, and Beverly Hills Speedway, which opened in 1920, only four years until the real estate developers got it. Riverside Raceway managed an unforgettable 32-year run before it was plowed under to make way for a shopping mall. Perhaps the ghost of Ken Miles still haunts the place; after years of decline, the mall boasts hundreds of thousands of vacant square feet.

Given the long odds, Auto Club Speedway, aka California Speedway, did pretty well—26 years from the day the 2.0-mile D-shaped banked oval opened to host 240-mph Indy-car laps to the day the wrecking ball arrived. Drone videos surfaced in November of chomping excavators tearing away at grandstands. In posterity, it joins the “Indianapolis of the West,” the short-lived Ontario Speedway (10 years, ending in 1980) which was just up the freeway. Its land now hosts a CarMax, a Benihana, and an El Torito, among its other pearls of suburban banality.

Auto Club’s demise leaves a metro area of nearly 13 million with only one circular track within its environs: Irwindale Speedway, a strictly amateur venue, which somehow has dodged decade-old plans to convert it into a mall. Likely because the mall business, thanks to Amazon, etc., is in even worse shape than the racing business. Vows by NASCAR to eventually replace Auto Club with a half-mile oval on what remains of acreage that has mostly been sold off to a developer intent on building logistics warehouses (for Amazon, etc.) have no firm timetable.

It’s a sad fact that in places, racing struggles to pay the bills for the increasingly expensive land that it occupies, and the forces of redevelopment never sleep. To the north, Monterey County, the deed holder of Laguna Seca, was in December sued by locals aiming to curtail or eliminate the famed track. You can shout until you are blue in the face that the circuit, opened in 1957, predates all of the surrounding McMansions. But those people don’t care who was first, they really don’t. They have money and lawyers and they are game to try their luck in court.

It’s a challenge that race tracks share with local municipal airports. The airport where I keep my Cessna is a former U.S. Army Air Corps training base built in 1939, now under attack from a small but vocal clique of residents who wish it gone. They have already tasted blood in nearby Santa Monica, where an airfield that opened in 1923 and supplied thousands of Douglas Aircraft during World War II is set to close in 2028 so that developers can dine on its bones.

Once upon a time, a bolder America accepted and even celebrated these facilities as proof that the world’s greatest economy produced vital and thrilling pursuits that enriched our lives and supplied a creative outlet to our energy and industry. Now, a more flaccid nation that prefers to sit at home streaming and shopping foreign-made junk online sees nothing in these venues but noise, pollution, and risk. They are unwittingly being stoked by gimlet-eyed developers who are salivating over the land and willing to fund legal teams and sympathetic council candidates. Replacing a track or an airport with warehouses or 20 to 30 high-density housing units per acre will line the pockets of the developers, but it won’t do much for noise and pollution in the community. Everyone is bound to be disappointed—except the developers of course.

But the relentless demand for more housing drives cities to flatten anything in their path that appeals only to a minority. And like it or not, we are a minority. Unless we fight, unless we write letters and go to council meetings and support candidates who believe there should be recreational room for everyone, we will end up like the misfits in medieval times, hounded out the city gates and banished to the countryside so that we can continue enjoying activities that were once popular in an earlier, more energetic age. At least, until the city inevitably sprawls in our direction.

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As demand for new EVs slows in the U.S., James Mills’ recent screed for Hagerty U.K., concerning the dearth of demand in that market, adds perspective to the phenomenon. Enjoy! -Ed.

What’s this? Shock horror! Those crazy car-driving Brits aren’t exactly flocking to showrooms to buy an electric car.

Goodness. Who’d have thought it? Does the nation need its head testing?

According to the latest figures from the lobbying body known as the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), things are not entirely good in the gin-palace showrooms that cluster around industrial estates like mold in an airless bathroom.

Last month, the number of private buyers—that is to say someone buying a car personally, rather than being handed it through a company car scheme or purchasing it through their own business—tumbled like the range of an EV on the motorway.

January saw 4000 electric cars bought by private buyers, a drop of 25 percent compared with 5300 the previous year, says the SMMT.

Are you surprised? As a car enthusiast, probably not. You’ll know better than most that the government has done an outstanding job of giving consumers mixed messages and shaking their confidence, one minute offering incentives, the next removing them without notice, then declaring that civilization will end if we’re not all buying electric cars by 2030, only to change its mind and knock back the date of the apocalypse by another five years.

The good news: As choice improves, the electric car market continues to grow as a whole. But it would be growing further still if those paying with their own money weren’t feeling so hesitant.

The issue, presumably, is that while company car drivers are being showered with tempting tax breaks, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, there’s pretty much no sweetener to tempt those contemplating buying a new electric car.

And car salesmen, already a little miffed at being rapped over the knuckles for stitching us up with over-inflated finance in return for a nice backhander, are upset. It’s hard not to feel sympathy toward their plight; the poor buggers had worked tirelessly to earn the reputation for being the most cocky so-and-so’s of the automotive industry. Worse, even, than the patronizing car mechanics or unresponsive breakdown companies.

Salesmen are having to unlearn an entire skillset and watch as their commissions disappear in smoke, because there aren’t as many unwitting mugs walking through their doors announcing, “I’d like to pay well over the odds for a new car, please.” Hopefully, the Financial Conduct Authority will see consumers right.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Consumer confidence could be nurtured back to health. A template of how to efficiently electrify the vehicle fleet on the path to net zero has already been mapped out and shown to work. When not gazing up at the night sky and trying to find a bar serving a beer for less than £500, the Norwegians have set aside half a lifetime to figure out how they can make it worthwhile to drive electric. The dried-cod–loving Nordmenn kicked things off in 1990, when they announced they’d do away with import tax on electric cars, followed six years later by ditching road tax. Then things started to get really interesting. From 1997, if you drove an EV, they’d wave the many toll road charges, and from 1999 you could park for free. If you want to drive into London and spend your money in the shops, you need a second mortgage to afford to the parking fees.

Good, huh? It gets better. Next came cuts to company car tax, then VAT was dropped from the purchase price for private buyers. By 2005, those crazy cats did the unthinkable and allowed EVs to drive in bus lanes, then later dropped ferry charges and removed VAT from leasing. In 2017, they legislated for a right to charge, addressing the issue of charging when living in high-rise flats—a concept our politicians still can’t get their heads around.

This enduring commitment to carrot dangling—two decades or longer, in some areas—has worked a treat. In 2023, 82 percent of new cars sold in Norway were electric. And because 90 percent of its electricity comes from hydroelectric sources, with the remainder mostly wind power, the switchover doesn’t come with as many uncomfortable truths about the environmental benefits of battery-powered cars.

Contrast this with what Britain’s private drivers have been offered. There was the plug-in car grant, introduced in 2011 and gradually watered down until it was unplugged last spring. Doubtless, EV evangelists will shout about the exemption from road tax, but we can all kiss goodbye to that from 2025, when all of today’s EVs will cost £180 a year to tax, the same as gas guzzlers. There was also a contribution to installing a charging point, but in another act of great stupidity, that is now only available to homeowners who live in a flat and have off-street parking. About 11 people, then.

It’s rubbish, frankly. We all know how expensive electric cars are to buy compared with the petrol and diesel things we’ve grown up driving, but that seems to be lost on the government.

A new report from the House of Lords Environment and Climate Committee warns that the government needs to “put its foot on the accelerator” if the U.K. is to meet its self-imposed target for net-zero by 2050. It wants a new package of electric car purchase incentives, and says the government must act in three areas to move its strategy forward: consumer confidence, infrastructure, and industry support.

But they left out the most important recommendation of all: Organise a Zoom call with their opposite numbers in Norway, and ask them how they pulled it off.

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In December of 2023, the Federal Trade Commission created the Combating Auto Retail Scams (CARS) Rule to add “truth and transparency” to the process of buying a new car. The mission was clear: to eliminate “bait and switch” tactics, remove Finance and Insurance (F&I) add-ons that do not necessarily benefit the consumer, and ensure accurate pricing in dealership advertisements.

The new rules were so radical that the FTC created a handy website to help dealerships navigate the changes, complete with this snazzy infographic:

Not so fast, says the National Automobile Dealers Association. The NADA, a trade organization representing nearly 16,500 franchised new-vehicle dealerships in the U.S., is suggesting the CARS isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Via Reuters:

The FTC’s Vehicle Shopping Rule is simply terrible for consumers, adding massive amounts of time, complexity, paperwork and cost to car buying and car shopping for tens of millions of Americans every year.

NADA also says that the FTC has not explained why these changes are needed or how they will benefit customers. On January 5, both NADA and TADA (Texas Automobile Dealers Association) appealed for a review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi). Three days later, those trade groups filed a stay on the CARS Rule, pending the outcome of the appeal by the court. In a statement, the FTC refutes the accusations:

The (CARS) Rule does not impose substantial costs, if any, on dealers that presently comply with the law, and to the extent there are costs, those are outweighed by the benefits to consumers, to law-abiding dealers, and to fair competition.

Motor 1 reports that car dealerships might also be leery of the CARS Rule because it could levy fines of up to $50,120 per offense. Considering the aggression with which the Cars Rule approaches the issue of “bait and switch,” this concern would have some validity. Vehicles often sell faster than a dealership can update its inventory management system. In my decade in the car business, that issue crept up on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis: Some vehicles have multiple suitors at the same time, and website visitors can’t call ahead and reserve a vehicle. Online purchasing will change that dynamic, but there are still folks who insist on kicking the tires before getting banks involved. And social media is only making it harder to be a bait and switcher. Employees are encouraged to promote vehicles on their Facebook/Instagram/TikTok channels and, if they get the right feedback from a follower, they can grab the keys.

But the argument that dealerships would be worried about losing a cool 50 grand? That seems unlikely, given how much effort goes into levying the final penalty for dealership shenanigans. One such case took two years from start to finish, and the behavior of the dealerships involved reflected a pattern of willingly circumventing the FTC’s rules. Proving the presence of bait-and-switch tactics will not only be difficult, but it will also be immensely time-consuming for a defendant who must prove the status of every vehicle that winds up on the FTC’s radar. Whether the fine is large or small, nobody wants to be punished for making an honest mistake.

But the CARS Rule is concerned with more than just bait and switch. It also argues that the consumer shouldn’t be pressured (sorry) to buy items like tires pre-filled with nitrogen. (Dealers usually replace the factory valve-stem covers on the tires with green-tipped replacements to show the work has already been performed.) For those who haven’t been suckered into such a situation, nitrogen-filled tires supposedly reduce oxidation and hold pressure longer. But tires usually oxidize/degrade from external forces quickly enough to make the first argument irrelevant, and the second one doesn’t necessarily hold water.

We will keep an eye on how the Court of Appeals handles this one, because CARS Rule could become a whole lot of nada, if the dealer groups have their way.

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Are you kidding me? This must be a joke. Except that it isn’t.

In the spirit of Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Men in Black—“We at the FBI do not have a sense of humor we are aware of”—the U.S. Federal Highway Administration is banning humorous messages on electronic signs that appear on our highways and freeways.

According to the Associated Press and other news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, states have two years to implement all of the changes outlined in the agency’s new 1100-page manual, which includes restrictions on “General Information Signs” like electronic message boards. The manual explains that signage should be “simple, direct, brief, legible, and clear” and only be used for important information such as warning drivers of crashes ahead, adverse weather conditions, and traffic delays, as well as seatbelt reminders and warnings about the dangers of speeding or driving while impaired.

“A CMS [changeable message sign] should not be used to display a traffic safety campaign message if doing so could adversely affect respect for the sign,” the manual reads. “Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand.”

That’s bad news for those who enjoy the jokes, puns, and pop-culture references used by many states as a way to draw attention to important messages. Among those highlighted by the Associated Press: “Use Yah Blinkah” in Massachusetts; “Visiting in-laws? Slow down, get there late,” from Ohio; “Don’t drive Star Spangled Hammered,” from Pennsylvania; “Hocus pocus, drive with focus” from New Jersey; and “Hands on the wheel, not your meal” from Arizona.

Non-compliance with the new standards, which go into effect in 2026, could cost states federal assistance. Local officials may even end up in court.

Arizona state Rep. David Cook (R), whose state has more than 300 electronic signs along its highways, considers the new law an unneeded case of government overreach. “Why are you trying to have the federal government come in and tell us what we can do in our own state? Prime example that the federal government is not focusing on what they need to be.”

While the Federal Highway Administration claims humorous signs are distracting, the WSJ says there are conflicting studies about their effectiveness. In fact, the newspaper cited a 2020 analysis conducted for Virginia’s DOT which found that humorous signs actually “commanded the most cognitive attention.”

In addition to Arizona, President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware is among those states balking at the federal directive.

“Our position is that the messaging we use has a safety theme and therefore is appropriate for use,” the Delaware Department of Transportation says.

Before you ask, four states—Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii—already ban roadside advertising billboards, not because they distract drivers but because they detract from the natural beauty of the area. Which begs the question, isn’t natural beauty also distracting to drivers? And what about those do-everything electronic screens that are commonplace inside today’s modern vehicles?

We have no doubt that the issue is far from over. Perhaps someday we’ll all look back on this and … laugh.

***

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The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Choice in Automobile Retail Sales (CARS) Act, legislation that directly targets President Biden’s federal regulations that take aim at petroleum-powered vehicles.

The vote was 221-197, with every Republican and five Democrat members of Congress voting in favor of the CARS Act. The legislation was introduced five months ago in response to tailpipe emissions regulation proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in April that, the White House claims, could result in 67 percent of new car, SUV and light truck purchases, up to 50 percent of bus and garbage truck purchases, and up to 25 percent of long-haul trucks going electric by 2032.

“The passage of the CARS Act is a massive victory for every consumer and the entire American auto industry,” Representative Tim Walberg (R-Michigan), one of the bill’s sponsors, told Fox News Digital. “Biden’s mandate has always been unrealistic, and a textbook study on how central planning and Bidenomics simply do not work. Mandating EVs has never been a responsible or affordable solution.

“Just last week, nearly 4000 car dealers sent a letter to the Biden administration asking them to reconsider their EV mandate, citing a lack of demand from consumers. Today, with the passage of the CARS Act, the House showed we’re listening,” said Walberg.

If passed into law, the CARS Act would prohibit the EPA from finalizing proposed federal emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles for model years 2027 to 2032. The CARS Act also prevents future EPA emissions regulations that would mandate certain technologies or limit the availability of vehicles based on engine type.

“Thousands of small businesses and their employees will be adversely impacted by this proposal’s overly aggressive push to electrify America’s automotive sector,” said SEMA president and CEO Mike Spagnola. “There are many options on the road to zero emissions. American-grown biofuels, carbon capture and innovations in engine production are all aimed at this shared goal.”

U.S. Senators Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) have introduced a bipartisan companion version of the CARS Act in the Senate. The bill has 33 co-sponsors and awaits consideration in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Not everyone supports neutering the EPA’s ability to lessen the impact of motor vehicles. “Tailpipe pollution causes tens of thousands of premature deaths nationwide each year, especially in communities of color,” said Chelsea Hodgkins, senior zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) advocate with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “EPA must uphold its commitment to environmental justice this year by issuing the strongest clean car standards.”

The White House issued a statement saying it “strongly opposes” the CARS act, and if the president is presented with the bill, “he would veto it.”

“We’re grateful to the Biden Administration for opposing this ridiculous attempt by House Republicans to block important climate and clean air safeguards for the American public,” said Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce. “Our communities are suffering from poor air quality and worsening climate impacts—pollution from our cars and trucks is a major contributor to both.

“The White House and the EPA rightfully see electrifying vehicles—among other clean transportation priorities like expanding transit and investing in infrastructure for safer streets—as central to tackling the climate crisis and protecting public health. The EPA’s clean car standards can deliver massive benefits to local communities, while saving people money on gas.”

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It’s been a big year for Right to Repair. Starting with John Deere signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in January that allows farmers and independent repair shops to perform maintenance on their own tractors, 2023 has provided multiple victories on behalf of consumers. Some of those wins are directly related to the automotive industry.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states and Puerto Rico considered Right to Repair legislation during the 2023 legislative session. Maine became the fifth state in 11 months to approve Right to Repair legislation, when 84 percent of voters said yes to the question, “Should auto manufacturers enable owners and their preferred mechanics to access their car’s diagnostics systems?” Other states to pass similar laws in 2023 are:

• Colorado, which now “requires agricultural equipment manufacturers to provide resources for individuals to repair their own agricultural equipment”;
• California, which “requires manufacturers [of electronic or appliance products, with some exclusions*] to provide the means to diagnose, maintain, or repair for seven years for products with a price point more than $100 and three years for products under $100”;
• New York, which “requires manufacturers [excluding makers of cars and farm equipment, among others**] to provide consumers with parts or tools for electronic equipment manufactured for the first time and sold or used in New York after July 1, 2023”; and
• Minnesota, which enacted the Digital Fair Repair Act, which requires “manufacturers of certain electronic products to make documentation, parts, and tools for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair available to independent repair providers and product owners on fair and reasonable terms.”

In a nutshell, the Right to Repair fight comes down to this: Consumers want the right to work on their own cars, farm machinery, and electronics. Manufacturers, of course, would rather keep the required computer codes and specialized tools to themselves, citing trademark issues and trade secrets.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, says that not allowing consumers the right or resources to repair their own electronics seems illogical.

“When people hear about the right to repair, they say, ‘Oh my God, my dishwasher was broken and I couldn’t get it fixed. My cell phone was broken and it cost me an arm and a leg,’” Gay Gordon-Byrne says. “And it’s very popular from that standpoint because everybody needs to get their stuff fixed.”

However, the idea that “I own it, therefore I should be able to fix it” isn’t popular among manufacturers—and some in the media—who are concerned that sharing proprietary information could affect safety, efficiency, and incentive to innovate. Regardless, Right to Repair advocates remain steadfast.

“It’s pretty incredible the array of people coming out to support (Right to Repair) …” says Allison Conwell, an advocate for Colorado Public Interest Research Group (CoPIRG). “But it’s pretty clear that this is going to take a big effort when you look at who’s across the table.”

Specific to automobiles, the first of many attempts to establish the right to repair arrived in 2001, when the Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act was introduced in the United States Congress. However, the bill went nowhere. Eleven years later, in 2012, Massachusetts voters approved a Right to Repair proposal that “required vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers’ Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities.” The law was then used as a starting draft to create similar legislation in other states.

Three years ago, in November 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that expanded the rights of do-it-yourselfers and independent mechanics, allowing them access not only to mechanical information but also to wirelessly transmitted information such as telematics, driving, and diagnostics data. Automakers almost immediately filed suit to stop the measure, claiming the law was “unenforceable because it is unconstitutional.” While the case is still working its way through the courts, in August 2023 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) instructed Massachusetts authorities to begin enforcing the Right to Repair law—just months after the same agency told automakers to ignore it.

Of the 74 Right to Repair legislation proposals introduced in 2023, most either failed or remain pending. Of those that specifically mention “motor vehicles,” two failed (in Maryland and Montana), and two are pending (in Hawaii and New York).

While Right to Repair advocates applaud victories in Massachusetts, Colorado, California, New York, Minnesota, and Maine in the last three years, they also admit they have a long way to go. For now, those six states will provide a litmus test that will be closely watched by legislators in the other 44. Stay tuned.

* Agricultural, forestry, industrial, or construction industry equipment; video game consoles; and alarm systems, like fire alarms are all excluded from California’s 2023 Right to Repair legislation. 

** As reported by the New York National Law Review, home appliances that have a “digital electronic product embedded within,” medical devices, motor vehicle manufacturers, and farm and utility tractors and off-road equipment are all excluded from New York’s Right to Repair law. 

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Oh, California, you give us hope. Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed and approved a bill,  simply named “Vehicles,” which removed the existing laws against lowriders and cruising. Time to go low and slow again, baby! This reversal, some 20 years in the making, is welcome from a state that has aggressive EV mandates. The biggest car-related news from California, however, is the sudden suspension of Cruise driverless taxis. In a statement, the California DMV said it determined that “the vehicles are not safe for public operation.” There is no set duration for the suspension and the company can operate its vehicles if there is a safety driver behind the wheel.

The spark for the suspension, according to Reuters, appears to be an October 2 accident between a Cruise vehicle and a pedestrian. This development speaks to the high safety bar expected of driverless cars that may be impossible to clear. After all, humans create plenty of chaos. Do the robots have to be perfect or were the Cruise vehicles simply stupidly sloppy? We’ll learn more in the coming weeks.

Last week, I was on a different sort of cruise during an eight-day work/fun road trip that provided another slate of rich experiences. In rural southeast Ohio, a gas-station attendant noticed me staring at the Powerball lottery poster. A handwritten number on the poster indicated that the prize was $1.8 billion. “Yep, that’s billion with a B,” the attendant said. “People are going crazy over it.” As I pulled out three dollars to buy a ticket, I asked if he’d seen the studies that claim lottery winners usually end up less happy. “Yeah, well,” he replied, “If I win, I’ll be gone well before they can ask me.” True that.

I felt a bit guilty for playing but then again, I did have a few pleasurable minutes thinking about what I’d do with $1.8 billion. First thing would be to buy this Toyota Celica race car built by Dan Gurney. It’s still listed although the experts at Hagerty Marketplace have intel that suggests it already sold. I’ll live just fine without it.

My trip culminated with a two-day driving rally I organized for friends. I do this every year or so, usually in Ohio, but switched things up this year and hosted in Asheville, North Carolina. I started running these rallies about eight years ago because I simply enjoy sharing the driving experience with others. When folks tell me they want to join but can’t find the time, my response is, “Got it. Just remember that we’re all gonna die someday.”

I enjoy planning the routes and anticipating that participants will feel the same joy I do driving them. That said, it’s a nerve-wracking job. People are spending scarce resources—time and money—and who wants to join a disorganized event? I’ve found that if you have a solid baseline—a few stops on the routes and dinner plans each evening—the rest usually works out. Barring an accident, the unexpected usually adds to the experience. This year, one of our drivers hit an object in the road and bent a wheel, which sent him on a tour of Asheville to find a fix. The locals guided him to a welding shop, where the owner heated the wheel and banged it back into shape. Then he found a new tire. That night, the bent-wheel guy had a terrific tale to share over dinner.

The driving was fantastic, the camaraderie even more so. A shared experience binds people. Since it’s never been easier to organize your own event—I use the Rallista app—I hope you’ll follow my lead and create your own. We need more connections between us.

Speaking of connections, did you see that some 33 states banded together to sue Meta, aka Facebook? They’re alleging that the company employs purposely addictive features to hook kids. Wow. I want to be a free-market libertarian, but I’ve fought the phone fight with my three kids for over a decade and I’m exhausted. You’re hosed no matter what you do: Ostracize the kid from their friends by not permitting a phone or allow one and then watch them go down the rabbit hole. I do think phones are one reason why kids no longer just roam their neighborhoods, a beneficial experience. As a parent, you’re forced to arrange or imagine ever more compelling experiences to compete. I understand Meta’s defense—kids use way more apps than just Instagram—so maybe this is a start of, I don’t know, something?

Sorry for the rant but we all see the empty-calories junk content the algorithms encourage people to create. Here at Hagerty Media, we’ve taken a strong stance against wasting our audience’s valuable time. I hope you agree and if you do, please consider supporting us by joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

This week, we are buzzing over the rumor that Dodge’s gas-powered muscle cars might not be dead. In a terrific turn of ingenuity and energy, a Ford enthusiast created a replacement engine block for Ford Model As. Super cool! And since many of us are getting ready to store our cars for the winter, here are some tips from Rob Siegel.

Have a great weekend,

P.S.: Your feedback is very welcome. Comment below!

Please share this newsletter with your car-obsessed friends and encourage them to sign up for the free weekly email. The easy-to-complete form is here. And if you’d like to support the efforts of Hagerty Media, please consider joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

The post Never Stop Driving #72: Let’s Cruise! appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A plan announced this fall by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to curtail off-road driving near the beloved Jeeper haven of Moab, Utah, has pitted environmentalists against a growing number of recreational trail drivers. It seems like nobody will get exactly what they want, which is perhaps by design.

The plan, announced on September 28 and due to take effect at the end of October, unless a pending court challenge prevents it, closes to motor vehicles 317 miles of unmaintained road and dirt two-track trails in a particularly scenic area northwest of the outdoorsy berg of Moab. Other trails have new restrictions.

The plan was spurred generally by a dramatic increase in off-roading in recent decades and in particular by a 2017 court settlement with the local Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an environmental group. The Wilderness Alliance had sued the BLM to force the federal agency to develop and implement an updated plan for preserving the landscape.

Though the federal plan only addresses about 28 percent of the miles of trail in that particular area, Jeepers and enthusiasts of off-highway vehicles (OHVs) and UTVs (utility-terrain vehicles, or “side-by-sides”) complain that it all but freezes them out of the best parts of this landscape by greatly reducing motorized access to the Green River and some of its tributaries. In these areas, the waterways cut dramatic, thousand-foot-deep canyons that wind through ancient formations of ochre-colored Navajo, Kayenta, and Wingate sandstone.

“There’s no other way to say this. The travel plan is the worst defeat motorized recreation has suffered in decades,” wrote Patrick McKay of Colorado Off-Road Trail Defenders on the group’s Facebook site. “Almost every major trail west of Moab is closed, including Day Canyon Point, Hey Joe Canyon, Mashed Potatoes, Ten Mile Canyon, Hell Roaring Canyon, Mineral Canyon, 7-Up, two of the three overlooks on Deadman Point, and many more.”

The so-called Labyrinth Rims Gemini Bridges Travel Management Area consists of 812 miles of off-road routes spread out like a spider’s web over 300,000 acres of desert and canyon in Utah’s Grand County, which includes Moab. It is only a tiny part of the whopping 42 percent of Utah that is under the administration of the federal Bureau of Land Management, which often finds itself squeezed between conservationists in the state who want to keep the landscape wild and those who wish to recreate in it or exploit it for its commercial potential.

The Labyrinth Rims area has long been used for cattle grazing as well as uranium mining, and it is now spotted with natural gas drilling pads that in recent years have encroached ever closer to the nearby Canyonlands National Park. Meanwhile, Moab has become a thriving tourist hub that caters to visitors of all stripes wanting to engage with a majestic landscape formed over millennia by wind, water, and geologic upheaval. Along its main drag are numerous businesses renting Jeeps and UTVs as well as offering guided off-road tours. In March, tens of thousands of off-roaders converge on the town for the Easter Jeep Safari, an event so important on the Jeeping calendar that Stellantis, which owns the Jeep brand, uses it to debut new designs.

A city of 5000 permanent residents but millions of visitors annually, Moab is unquestionably a victim of its own success. Nestled in the scenic Spanish Valley next to the Colorado River, where it meanders below sheer cliff faces on its way to Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon, it was for decades a dusty backwater that never fully recovered from the bust of the uranium mining rush in the 1950s. At least, until the rock climbers, river rafters, backpackers, and Jeepers discovered it in more recent years.

A massive national ad campaign, along with the arrival of commercial airliner service and a hotel-building spree in the 2010s, resulted in a tsunami of visitors from all over the world. After an initial slowdown early in the 2020 pandemic, tourism rebounded hard, with ensuing traffic jams, sold-out hotels, and overwhelmed eateries.

The nearby Arches National Park was forced to create a reservation system to stanch the long lines that daily formed at its gate, and many of the town’s inhabitants have turned sour on its tourism industry, voting in a city council that has tightened noise and speed restrictions and even moved to kick out an Easter Jeep-like festival that was just for ATVs. The crush in Moab has spurred other Utah towns to revise their master plans to limit tourism. In Bluff, a hundred miles to the south, a popular bumper sticker reads “Don’t Moab my Bluff.”

Having spent years visiting the area and traversing the trails in question, your author can attest to the gobsmacking grandeur of spots like the Hey Joe and Hell Roaring canyons. And as well to the fact that the volume and speed of the vehicle traffic on Moab’s trails has grown exponentially, especially since the pandemic. That has had deeply negative side effects in terms of trail erosion and trash.

In the old days, when relatively few people braved this wilderness in crude and hard-riding 4x4s such as Jeep CJs and Toyota FJ40s, the speeds were necessarily slow and the impact on the landscape was minimal.

Nowadays, the burgeoning off-road, powersports, and overlanding industries are eager to supply enthusiasts with high-horsepower vehicles that have giant indestructible tires, rut-smoothing suspensions, and future-tech camping amenities. Modified Jeeps and purpose-built side-by-sides give legions of visitors the ability to effortlessly cruise Moab’s outback, often moving at 40 or 50 mph at the pointy end of huge dust clouds. In their wake: denuded trails, flattened brush, human waste, and camping fire rings sprinkled with trash.

Though many Jeep clubs work hard to maintain trails and set high standards for land stewardship, they only represent a fraction of Moab visitors, some of whom exhibit no concern for the land whatsoever. The BLM’s job isn’t to keep people out of wild places, exactly, but rather to balance the needs of the land with those of the visitors and residents. The BLM’s trail-closure plan for Moab seems to be making the case that not every spot on Earth, or even in Utah, needs to be accessible by a motorized vehicle. Whether it remains in place is now up to the courts.

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The party’s over. The State of Vermont has closed the too-good-to-be-true loophole that allowed you to register a motor vehicle there without living in the state and without physically making an appearance at a Vermont registry, without proof of insurance, and, if the vehicle is 15 years or older, without a title or a previous registration.

My knee-jerk reaction was that it was partially my fault.

To appreciate the utility of “The Vermont Loophole,” you have to understand how much registration laws vary state to state. My home state of Massachusetts requires a title for all cars no matter how old, so if you stumble upon your dream Jaguar E-Type barn find with no paperwork and it’s sold to you on just a bill of sale, you can’t register it. The state does, however, realize that many states don’t issue titles for cars that are over 15 years old, so if you buy an old car from out of state, Massachusetts will register it if you present a previous registration and a bill of sale both in the name of the seller. But if an old registration can’t be produced, you’re out of luck.

Such was the case when I bought “Louie,” the 1972 BMW 2002tii that was the subject of my book Ran When Parked. In it, I describe the previous owner finding that the title and prior registration, which had both been stored in the glove compartment, had been eaten by mice. I took the risk and bought the car anyway. I looked into vehicle title service companies and learned that what most of them do is run the car through the DMV of a state with lax registration laws, and that’s something you can do yourself. At the time, I had a good friend living in Maine, a state where you can register a car with only a handwritten bill of sale (no title or former registration), and where, as an added bonus, there’s no automotive sales tax, so I sold it to him. He did need to insure the car and make a physical trip to the registry, but once he did, he had a paper registration in his name. I paid all his expenses, and he then sold me back the car, thereby providing the prior registration and bill of sale in the same seller’s name I needed in Massachusetts. I then registered the car here and paid the sales tax and all fees.

But as part of this process, I stumbled upon a post on a motorcycle website about registering old barn-find bikes. It was there that I learned that, like Maine, the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles will allow you to register a 15-year-old vehicle with only a bill of sale (no title or old registration required), but Vermont had an additional three-way twist that sounded too good to be true. First, you didn’t need to be a Vermont resident to register a car there. Second, you didn’t even need to show up at the DMV; the entire process could be handled by mail. Third, no proof of insurance was required. Since Vermont doesn’t issue titles for cars older than 15 years, the process didn’t result in a title, but it did give you that all-important registration in your name, which, in theory, allowed you to transfer the registration to your home state and title the vehicle there, as if you’d just moved there. Unlike Maine, Vermont assesses a 6 percent sales tax on the greater of the NADA low book value or the actual paid price, but what you were getting in return sounded very appealing. In 2019, I wrote about all this for Hagerty in “The Vermont Loophole.”

Not long after the piece was published, I had three reasons to try The Vermont Loophole myself. I owned a 1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special that I’d spent six years resurrecting and had just gotten running. The first issue was that, although I had the title from the previous owner, there was a minor recording error. It probably could’ve been corrected via a notarized affidavit, but if it couldn’t, the consequence was unclear. The second issue was that the car had a cracked windshield that prevented it from passing Massachusetts state inspection, and at that time, no Europa windshields were available anywhere in the United States. The third was that my mother was dying, I wanted to be with her as much as possible, and spending an entire day at a Massachusetts registry wasn’t something I was willing to do.

So, since all I had to do was fill out a form, send a check, and wait for the time to pass, I tried using The Vermont Loophole as a temporary measure to register the car. Regarding the cracked windshield, Vermont (like Massachusetts) requires an annual inspection, so I’ll admit that my logic here was a bit suspect. I was banking on the idea that even though a Massachusetts State Police officer could pull me over and ticket me for driving a Vermont-plated car with no Vermont inspection sticker, he or she would be less likely to do so than if the car had Massachusetts plates.

To my surprise and delight, the whole thing worked. The by-mail Vermont registration process was a bit murky—it’s not as if the website had yellow-highlighted “THOSE TRYING TO REGISTER AN OUT-OF-STATE BARN-FIND CAR WITH NO DOCUMENTATION, CLICK HERE” banners on it. You needed to download Vermont VD-119 form, fill it out, print the NADA values for the car, circle the low value, calculate 6 percent of that and add it to the $76 registration fee, and send the form and a check for the total amount. Although I wasn’t certain whether or not it was required, the motorcycle-centric article I read talked about photographing the VIN plate, so I did that, printed it, and included it as well.

And then I waited. About three weeks later, my bank showed that the check had been cashed. About a week after that, an envelope arrived with a Vermont license plate and registration. Shortly after that, I received a sticker for the plate. I then wrote a second article detailing my specific experience using the loophole. Over the years, I fielded many emails helping people with the process, and I got to see the joy on their faces when they sent me selfies of them and their Vermont plate.

To be absolutely clear about this, it’s almost certainly against some rarely-enforced motor vehicle law to continue to drive a car that’s registered in “State A” when you legally reside in “State B”—you’d need to check with the laws of both states. Thus, people using The Vermont Loophole to deal with title-less barn-find cars were advised to get the Vermont registration and then immediately use it as proof of ownership to legally register the car in their home state. I never intended to continue driving on the Vermont plates, at least not for as long as I have, but the Lotus was in a perpetual state of being sorted out, it took me a few years to find a windshield to replace the Lotus’ cracked one, and when I did, it was via a group buy through a Europa enthusiast group. By the time all the orders were collected and the giant crate of windshields were delivered to Rhode Island, we were mired in the pandemic, during which my wife and I seriously considered moving to Vermont, so getting the Vermont tags off the Lotus dropped to the bottom of my priority list. I finally got the windshield installed this past spring, so now that the car is inspectable and my wife and I appear to be staying put, there’s nothing preventing me from transferring the registration to Massachusetts. I just haven’t gotten around to it. And, although I feel conspicuous as all get-out by driving this highly-visible little slot car around Massachusetts with no inspection sticker on it, I’ve never been stopped and ticketed for it.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one who had publicly used The Vermont Loophole. YouTuber Doug DeMuro telegraphed its existence in a video about buying and registering a tiny little European Mercedes A-class that’s proudly wearing Vermont plates. The writer, Mercedes Streeter, did a series of articles on Jalopnik about buying an International school bus and registering it in Vermont as an RV, as the state doesn’t have the RV requirements other states do. One of them was titled “My Bus Has Plates Because the Vermont DMV is Secretly America’s DMV.” And if you simply search YouTube for “The Vermont Loophole,” you’ll find dozens of videos, both from do-it-yourselfers and professional firms like Car Titles.

As usage of The Vermont Loophole became more widespread, certain states began to push back. Reportedly, Florida now refuses to transfer Vermont registrations to their states unless the Vermont registration address is actually in Vermont. People in Ohio also report problems transferring Vermont registrations there. But I didn’t expect a friend of mine to send me a link to this video, in which my Lotus had become the literal poster child for abuse of The Vermont Loophole. Specifically, the owner of Car Titles is taking me to task for continuing to drive the car on Vermont plates instead of using them as a stepping stone to register the car in my home state.

So, were automotive gadflies like me and Mercedes Streeter, writers who were quite public about using The Vermont Loophole, responsible for its closure?

I don’t think so.

It appears that the change may have had less to do with publicized individual car-nut cases like mine and more to do with for-profit businesses using the Vermont DMV as a turnstile to process large volumes of transactions. Streeter’s recent piece on The Autopian quotes a Vermont DMV official who said that the loophole was being abused by “runners” making in-person appearances at DMV locations several times a week to process multiple transactions. When there were hiccups with paperwork, “these runners became very hostile and belligerent to the staff,” requiring the DMV to “station sworn law enforcement officers at several branch offices.” The registry official also mentions multiple power-of-attorney forms bearing the same signature, stolen vehicles, salvage vehicles, and bogus ownership documents. In other words, they’re likely reacting to organized fraud, not to individuals registering a 50-year-old Lotus or a school bus camper conversion.

On June 26, 2023, the Vermont DMV issued a policy update that stated, “The Department will not process this/these transaction(s) unless or until the owner of the subject vehicle can establish a legitimate connection to the State of Vermont.”

The funny thing is that, just before this happened, I saw an ad for a pretty cool, unfinished Cobra replica project. It had a beat-up powder blue body, deep-dish rear wheels, side pipes, and an attractive asking price, and it spoke to me in that special way that gets your blood up. At the end of the description, it said, “This is a kit car and the buyer is required to do diligence with their local DMV, as the origin of the body is unknown.” My knee-jerk reaction was “No problem. I’ve got The Vermont Loophole in my back pocket.”

No more.

I’ve received my renewal for the Vermont registration for the Lotus, so it appears that existing registrations are not impacted. Nonetheless, I think that it’s best that I mark the end of the party by cleaning up my mess and taking the long-overdue step of registering the car in Massachusetts.

But I’m glad that I got the chance to have a beer at the Vermont Animal House Delta Tau Chi party before Dean Wormer shut it down.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best of the Hack Mechanic: 35 years of Hacks, Kluges, and Assorted Automotive Mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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Gary Bartlett didn’t set out to be the first person to import a car under the Show or Display rule—he and his wife just happened to sit at the right dinner table at the right time. The ensuing adventure would pave the way for importers who use the rule to this day to bring rare and historically significant foreign-market cars to the United States.

Show or Display, the provision that is the only legal way to import cars that are less than 25 years old into the U.S., is now over two decades old. The process for adding a vehicle to the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) list of accepted cars and making sure it clears the necessary Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions hurdles remains tedious, but after 23 years, the steps are now established and clear. That wasn’t the case when Bartlett struck up the conversation in the spring of 1999 that would lead him down this path.

“We had driven our Jaguar XKSS to Belgium for a speed trial, and through an odd series of events we ended up at a table next to the managing director of Jaguar, Mike Beasley,” says Bartlett. “In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I’d love to own a Jaguar XJ220, and he said they had 14 that remained unsold that they’d love to dump—I think those were his exact words. That’s when we started talking about Show or Display—the ‘Bill Gates law’ that was about to come into effect, and how it could soon be possible to legally import the XJ220 to America.”

As Bartlett implies, Mircosoft founder Bill Gates was largely responsible for this provision. In the late 1980s, Gates imported a new Porsche 959 to California, only for it to be held up with customs for years because foreign-market vehicles under 25 years old were not legal for importation. It took time, but the advocacy of Gates and others successfully carved out the legislative solution that passed Congress in 1998, which would come to be referenced as Show or Display.

The language, tucked in a much larger bill with other transportation-related authorizations, enabled the DOT to exempt certain motor vehicles from certain motor-vehicle safety standards if they were imported for the purpose of show or display. Establishing the requirements and process for implementation would be left to the agency itself.

Meanwhile, after their initial conversation, Bartlett and Beasley began to firm up the deal for the XJ220. Jaguar was a motivated seller—if Bartlett could successfully secure eligibility for the XJ220 under the new provision, that would open up the U.S. market and hopefully enable the sale of the remaining XJ220s languishing in Coventry. Ultimately, it was decided that Jaguar would sell Bartlett an XJ220 at a reduced price if he would go through the process, and the company would also provide the necessary support to help ensure the car would pass U.S. emissions requirements.

Bartlett submitted his application to the DOT on August 11, 1999—two days before the law took effect. At that point, it wasn’t merely a matter of waiting for the agency to respond—as the first applicant, Bartlett and his XJ220 were about to become the test case that established precisely what went into determining a car’s eligibility under Show or Display. Working with a federal agency might sound like a daunting task, but Bartlett soon discovered what may have been the primary factor for Show or Display’s success: There was a car guy in charge of its implementation.

“If it hadn’t have been for somebody like Dick Merritt serving as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Vehicle Compliance Officer, who knows what would’ve happened,” says Bartlett. “Merritt actually knew cars, and it was fortuitous at the time that he was there.”

Decades earlier, Bartlett had met Merritt while attending a mechanic’s school in Chicago that specialized in training on Ferraris. Merritt instructed there, and had established himself as a preeminent authority on that marque. Fast forward to the summer of 1999, the two reestablished their connection and, along with Bartlett’s employee, Ken Sheppard, got down to business navigating the new Show or Display rule.

“Dick gave us the guidelines in the new law, but they needed to be put into a format that applicants could understand,” Bartlett says. “We worked with him to help create that format. Dick and I would talk on the phone—I remember him being a very precise, matter-of-fact kind of guy—then Ken and I would work on the language and submit it back via fax. He would look at it, make notes, and either call me or fax it back. At the end, the process for determining eligibility was still somewhat complex, but it was much more manageable for applicants and DOT.”

The resulting process put finer points on the provision’s requirement that only historically or technologically significant vehicles that were never certified by their manufacturer for U.S. sale would be eligible. These include questions as to whether the vehicle is still in production, whether its production exceeded 500 units, and whether it is a kit car or replica. Any “yes” answers to those questions (along with two others pertaining to certification and importation) means a likely rejection letter, though if production exceeded 500 units, you are welcome to submit additional information supporting your cause. These remain the eligibility standards by which potential Show or Display importations are judged today.

Thanks in large part to Merritt’s cooperation, the XJ220 cleared the DOT eligibility hurdle. Concurrent with Bartlett, Merritt, and Sheppard sorting the paperwork, though, was the XJ220’s emissions testing. That was a stickier wicket.

The car had to meet EPA emission standards for the year in which it was constructed, 1994. “The lab we used to test the XJ220 was called Compliance and Research Services in Linden, New Jersey,” says Bartlett. “That’s who Jaguar contracted with on some of their new cars.” All did not go smoothly, however.

“When it came over here the first time, we took it to the lab and it failed miserably. That’s when Jaguar’s commitment to assist with emissions compliance became so invaluable,” Bartlett says. Others seeking to import through Show or Display didn’t enjoy manufacturer support and had to work with private shops to retune their cars—something that’s not simple today but was a much more complex undertaking at that time. Bartlett packed the car up and sent it back to Jaguar’s Whitley Engineering Center in Coventry.

“The car went back and forth several times. Every time we had to be sure the paperwork was right or customs would impound the car,” he says. “The engineers in Whitley found out that by changing the camshaft timing, using Swiss software and new converters, it would pass the U.S. EPA tests. It was already an incredibly powerful car,” adds Bartlett, “but it turns out these changes actually increased power in addition to making the car compliant.” The Jaguar became 49-state legal (it failed the California Air Resource Board’s evaporative emissions tests), and that was enough for Bartlett, who resides in Indiana.

On March 1, 2000, a little more than six months after Bartlett submitted his application, NHTSA granted entry to the Jag under Show or Display with a letter marked SD-00-001, indicating it was the first vehicle approved through that process. The car was now his to enjoy within the 2500 miles that Show or Display allowed per year.

You might think that after all the work he put in, and the fact that Bartlett is a passionate, lifelong Jaguar fan, that his salad days with the XJ220 began with that letter. Unfortunately, he came to know firsthand why Jaguar had trouble unloading the final 14 cars. “I drove the car back to Indiana from New York, and by the time I got home,” he says, “I thought, ‘What the hell have I bought?’”

Bartlett was one of many who fell in love when the XJ220 concept debuted in October 1988. Its four-cam, 6.2-liter V-12 sent power to all four wheels, and the car sported then state-of-the-art four-wheel steering and four-channel ABS. It was a tantalizing vision of what the next-generation Jaguar supercar could be.

Disappointingly, the production XJ220 would end up a shell of what the concept promised, with the Jaguar-Tom Walkinshaw partnership settling on a 542-hp 3.5-liter V-6 that, while powerful, sounded nothing like the big V-12s that Jaguar was famous for and had used to win at Le Mans in 1990. It also scaled back on the tech, eliminating the four-wheel steering and all-wheel drive. To make matters worse, the supercar market took a dive right around the production XJ220’s 1992 debut, further assuring the car’s poor sales.

Of course, Bartlett knew this in 1999. “It’s a gorgeous Jaguar, and I’m a serious Jaguar guy,” he says, and he pushed ahead.

A seasoned amateur racer with an FIA license, Bartlett knows a thing or two about reaching a car’s capabilities. “The 220 was brutally fast in a straight line, but didn’t stop very well. It also had a wicked tendency to go from understeer to a nasty oversteer,” he says. “The transmission was OK, but it was almost agricultural in how it shifted—the gears felt big and heavy. It also had a fair amount of turbo lag. It would take somebody the likes of David Coulthard, David Brabham, and John Nielsen, who won their class at Le Mans in 1993 in an XJ220, to really get the most out of this car.”

Even though the car itself was a disappointment, Bartlett remembers the experience fondly. “What shop could you go to that would have the expertise that Jaguar’s Whitley Engineering Center had?” he asks. “Traveling there with the car to work on EPA compliance meant spending a lot of time with the engineers, surrounded by all the experimental projects they were working on. It was a fascinating place, and that was a heck of a lot of fun for me.”

Bartlett’s fun times have helped yield enjoyment for others as well. Though it all started with a happy accident, his direct role at the beginning of Show or Display helped build the path for a wealth of interesting cars to make their way to the States, from Porsche 959s to McLaren Speedtails and iterations of the incredibly popular Nissan Skyline GT-R. Remember that next time you sit down next to a stranger at dinner.

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Via Insider

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Feds’ new EV tax-credit rules are as strict as expected

Intake: The federal government on Friday unveiled its new tax-credit rules, deciding which EVs would get a tax break and which ones wouldn’t. The U.S. Treasury Department’s stricter rules will reduce or remove tax credits—which range up to $7500—for some zero-emission models but grant buyers another two weeks, until April 18. On that day, the new requirements take effect, and the Treasury Department publishes a list of eligible vehicles. The rules, which reward vehicles with batteries made in the U.S., are designed to wean the United States off its dependence on China for the materials needed to make EVs. The revised tax-credit rules are part of President Joe Biden’s effort to make 50 percent of U.S. new vehicle sales by 2030 EVs or plug-in hybrids, Reuters said.

Exhaust: Part of the EV tax credits, according to Reuters, require that 50 percent of the value of battery components be produced or assembled in North America to qualify for $3750 of the available credit and 40 percent of critical minerals sourced from the United States or a country with which it has a free-trade agreement. The Biden administration believes that over time the tax credit will result in more EVs sold as automakers scramble to revamp supply chains to meet critical mineral and battery component rules. It is not immediately clear when or how many EVs will lose tax credits or see them cut. — Steven Cole Smith

Baby Bugatti is getting its own little race series

Intake: It might only be three-quarters the size of the real thing, but we already know that the Baby Bugatti II from The Little Car Company is 100 percent fun. Now the scaled-down classic, together with drivers both young and old, will be put through its paces at some of Britain’s most historic racing venues. The UK Bugatti Baby II Championship will see 20 adult-and-child teams compete against each other in a three-pronged sprint series that takes in Silverstone and the Prescott Hill Climb—home of the Bugatti Owners’ Club—as well as The Little Car Company’s home at Bicester Heritage, in Oxfordshire. To be eligible, young drivers must be between the ages of 10 and 14 years old, and, while there’s no upper limit for mum or dad there’s a maximum height of 6 feet, 2 inches. You don’t need to own one of the £50,000 cars ($62,000) as the £4950 ($6100) entry fee is worked out on an arrive-and-drive basis with a car and factory support included. Entrants will even be offered coaching from Bugatti development driver and speed record holder Andy Wallace, and although the all-electric Baby’s top speed is only around 40 mph, we’re sure it will feel at least 25 percent faster.

Exhaust: This new series marks the first time in almost a century that junior Bugattis have actually been raced. Ettore Bugatti built the first Baby for his five-year-old son Roland in 1926 but such was the response it soon went into production, with around 500 examples built between 1927 and 1936. These half-scale replicas of the Type 35 Grand Prix were sold new for 5000 francs, an equivalent of $3500 today, and only 100 or so are believed to still exist. As a result, originals have been known to sell for over $100,000 and we can’t imagine anyone daring to race one. — Nik Berg

Surprise OPEC oil cuts should mean, yep, higher gas prices

Intake: The price of a gallon of gas, already inching upward because of the season, is set to climb higher. On Sunday, Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers announced surprise cuts, totaling up to 1.15 million barrels per day from May until the end of the year, “a move that could raise prices worldwide,” according to the Associated Press. The production cuts alone could push U.S. gasoline prices up by roughly 26 cents per gallon, in addition to the usual increase that comes when refineries change the gasoline blend during the summer driving season, said Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners LLC. The normal seasonal increase is about 32 cents a gallon, according to the Energy Department. Iraq said it would reduce production by 211,000 barrels per day, the United Arab Emirates by 144,000, Kuwait by 128,000, Kazakhstan by 78,000, Algeria by 48,000 and Oman by 40,000. Our gas prices likely won’t reach the level they did one year ago, when the national average was about $4.50.

Exhaust: The cuts mean money in the pocket of Russian president Vladimir Putin, AP says, whose country will cut production by 500,000 barrels per day. All the countries involved are members of the so-called OPEC+ group of oil-exporting countries, which includes the original Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Russia and other major producers. — SCS

GM to drop Apple Car Play and Android Auto

Intake: CNN is reporting that General Motors plans to phase out Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, technologies that allow a driver to bypass the vehicle’s native infotainment system and instead mirror their smartphone’s display, via software designed by the cell-phone manufacturer. In lieu of CarPlay or Android Auto, future GM electric vehicle will shift to built-in infotainment systems developed with Google. CNN suggests GM’s decision to stop offering those systems in future electric vehicles, starting with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer, could help the automaker capture more data on how consumers drive and charge EVs.

Exhaust: GM would benefit from focusing engineers and investment on one approach to more tightly connect in-vehicle infotainment and navigation with features such as assisted driving, Edward Kummer, GM chief digital officer, and Mike Hichme, executive director of digital cockpit experience, said in an interview. “We have a lot of new driver assistance features coming that are more tightly coupled with navigation,” Hichme told Reuters. “We don’t want to design these features in a way that are dependent on a person having a cellphone.” — SCS

Gas-sipping Golf on the way out

Intake: VW will not develop a new, ninth-generation Golf with a combustion engine after the current model reaches the end of its life cycle, according to Automotive News and its European sister publication Automobilwoche. The current, eighth-generation Golf will get a freshening next year. “That puts it in a great position until the end of the decade. Then we will have to see how the segment develops,” VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer told Automobilwoche. “If the world develops completely differently than expected by 2026 or 2027, then we can also launch a completely new vehicle again. But I don’t expect that to happen. So far, that’s not planned,” Schaefer said.

Exhaust: The Golf has been in production since 1974 and its name will be retained for a battery-electric vehicle. The internal-combustion-engine Golf’s exit won’t happen before 2028, Schäfer said, in concert with the arrival of the company’s new SSP electric platform. — SCS

Ford tuning out AM radios in ICE and EVs

Intake: Ford plans to stop installing AM radio in new gas-powered and electric vehicles beginning in 2024, including the all-electric Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning pickup, the Detroit Free Press has confirmed. “We are transitioning from AM radio for most new and updated 2024 models,” Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told the Free Press. There have been multiple manufacturers who complain that AM frequencies cause problems for electric vehicles, and therefore they dropped AM, but Ford is killing AM even in combustion-engine vehicles, though it will stay on in commercial vehicles.

Exhaust: According to The Verge, Ford was joined by BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo in staking out the position that AM radio is incompatible with EVs, citing electromagnetic interference from the powertrain. Tesla made this same argument when it dropped AM radio from its vehicles back in 2018. This can be troubling, as AM is often the best source for emergency broadcasts. — SCS

Tesla Semi gets first recall

Intake: The electric Tesla Semi truck, which began limited sales a few months ago, has its first recall, due to a supplier-sourced part. According to Electrek.co, the recall was announced on the NHTSA’s recall website, showing that the issue involves the parking brake and affects 35 vehicles. Apparently the electronic parking-brake module could fail to engage due to air leakage within the unit, leaving drivers unaware that it isn’t activated, possibly leading to a rollaway incident when the driver releases the service brake. This problem was identified as affecting 35 “Intellipark Valve Modules,” all from Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems.

Exhaust: Teslas detractors delight in posting photos of disabled Tesla trucks by the side of the road, but that wouldn’t be due to this parking-brake issue. Any all-new vehicle, especially one as ambitious as the Tesla Semi, is bound to suffer teething issues. — SCS

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If you have ever found yourself fortunate enough to be laughing your head off at the wheel of a Caterham Seven, Morgan 3 Wheeler or BAC Mono, there’s good news for their survival in a zero-emission-vehicle future, at least in Europe. Low-volume car manufacturers will be exempt from the 2035 ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine cars and commercial vehicles, the European Union has confirmed.

In a statement, the EU said: “Manufacturers responsible for small production volumes in a calendar year (1000 to 10,000 new cars or 1000 to 22,000 new vans) may be granted a derogation until the end of 2035 (those registering fewer than 1000 new vehicles per year continue to be exempt).”

For the U.K.’s sports car makers, they can continue selling their cars in Europe, although the country’s departure from the EU amid Brexit leaves a question mark over what will happen here.

The Department for Transport (DoT) says that the final details around its regulatory framework will be published “soon” but didn’t rule out a similar approach to the EU. Most promising is the fact that the U.K. plan “will take into consideration the role of small-volume manufacturers” for the “U.K.-specific regulations”.

Under current U.K. plans, the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars and vans will be banned in 2030, while all new cars and vans must be fully zero-emission from 2035.

The U.K. low-volume car industry is understandably positive about the EU announcement, with Neill Briggs, co-founder of BAC, telling Autocar he expects to steal sales from Europe’s big names. “I think there’s a huge opportunity that businesses like BAC will potentially take volume away from some of the big boys,” he said.

“If an electric solution for a Lamborghini, Porsche or Ferrari, for example, is perhaps not your bag and you prefer an internal combustion engine solution, then perhaps companies like Gordon Murray [Automotive] and BAC are going to be the places for people to go to.”

As of now, the United States has no federal-level plans for a phase-out of internal combustion power. As recently as 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published regulations that allow low-volume motor vehicle manufacturers to begin selling replica cars, albeit in compliance with date-of-production emissions requirements.

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Via Hagerty UK

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No, the regulations discussed here don’t apply in the United States. (At least, not yet.) Beyond our desire to bear other enthusiasts’ burdens, and to help you be informed about the global situation, we want to share Mills’ piece with you because it illuminates why car manufacturers build the vehicles they do. (Or don’t.) It’s not just about the customer—it’s about the government, and profit. —Ed. 

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re stupid. It’s nothing personal, and you haven’t done anything wrong to deserve the label. And if it’s any consolation, you’re not alone; I’m a doofus too, and so is every other driver buying a new car.

The problem is—and please, don’t bother trying to persuade anyone otherwise—your eyes are failing you. Yes, you may have had an eyesight test just last week and yes, the optometrist may have declared that your eyes would be the envy of any seasoned bird watcher, but take it from those who know better, you’re a menace behind the wheel who couldn’t recognize a traffic light or speed limit sign even if it was mounted on the bonnet.

Then there are your reactions! A sloth could do a better job of steering around an obstacle in the road. As for stepping on the brake pedal, can you even be trusted to remember which out of no fewer than three pedals—three, I tell you!—applies the slowy-down things?

And let’s not get started on knowing your lefts from your rights, or raising the seat high enough to peer over the top of the steering wheel. As for the two second rule, well, you are that fool.

Face it: It’s time to hang up your driving gloves—whether a nicely aged stringback or metaphorical pair.

At least, that seems to be the attitude of our good friends at the EU. They’ve been busy for the past … oh, let’s see … 10 years or more working on the anonymously titled General Safety Regulations 2, the difficult second-album follow up to General Safety Regulations.

What’s that, you may ask? GSR2 sets out to make new cars safer, in part by ruling that all new cars launched after 6 July 2022, regardless of price or engineering suitability, have to come with intelligent speed assistance and emergency lane-keeping system, amongst a host of other active and passive safety features including data recorders. From July 2024, existing cars already in showrooms will have to be modified to include this safety kit to stay on sale.

Taken at face value, anything that can help prevent an accident and lower the rate of injuries and fatalities on our roads is a good thing.

Unfortunately, there are increasing numbers of reports of the technology going rogue. The Sunday Times, amongst others, has highlighted a surprising number of cases where intelligent speed-assistance systems have proved anything but clever, misreading a 30 mph sign for a 100 mph sign (which, no prizes for guessing correctly, doesn’t exist in the U.K.) and taking off like a scalded cat.

The idea is that, when active, the cruise-control-type system uses a camera to spot speed limit signs and adapt the vehicle’s speed to the local limit. Think of it as an extra pair of eyes for a driver.

Except, surely, it’s human nature for drivers to see this type of convenience as one fewer thing for them to have to think about?

And then there are the lane-keep assistance systems, which prompt the driver and can even steer a vehicle if they think it’s wandering from its intended path. These can work well on well-marked motorways or dual carriageways. But, although they can be switched off, I have lost count of the number of cars I have reviewed over the years where the system has been overwhelmed by simple things like an absence of road markings on country roads, or decided to perform an emergency stop because of the proximity of a car parked at the side of a bend or even because it was challenged by a simple dip in a road.

So the tech isn’t reliable, yet it has to be fitted to new cars sold in the E.U. and U.K. (which is following the E.U.’s timeline). It may lull drivers into a false sense of security and mean they pay that little bit less attention at the wheel. And it costs a small fortune.

That last point is as painful for drivers who want an affordable car as it is for car enthusiasts. Small, cheap cars have been killed off because fitting them with all the safety and emissions equipment means there’s no profit left in them. So affordable new cars are now a thing of the past—bye-bye Fiesta, for example. Meanwhile, the kind of cars that driving purists love to champion are also on the ropes.

The GSR2 rules apply to all the mainstream car makers, because the exemption volume that was agreed to by the E.U. is capped at a paltry 1500 cars across the EU. Autocar reports that this is a problem for the likes of Alpine. Its acclaimed A110 sports car—a bit of a slow burner if ever there was one—has just enjoyed its best year of sales since reaching showrooms in 2017, comfortably above that 1500-car limit.

Setting aside the question of whether or not the sort of people buying an A110 in the first place want active driver aids, it doesn’t make financial sense to re-engineer the A110 to include intelligent speed assistance and an emergency lane-keeping system. So Alpine will be forced to sell fewer of them in France and the U.K., and try its luck in markets where GSR2 rules don’t apply. And I think we can all predict how this will impact any potential replacement for the A110.

Even Japanese giant Toyota finds itself caught out by GSR2. Its GR86, one of the last relatively affordable fun driver’s cars money can buy, will have a comically short shelf-life of just two years because it’s built on the platform of the old GT86 and can’t be cost-effectively adapted to accept the safety kit.

Even as law makers add more safety kit to new cars, though, U.K. road fatalities have been static for the past decade.

In case you hadn’t guess it, GSR2 is the E.U.’s path to enabling fully driverless vehicles, and while I’m still to meet anyone who tells me they can’t wait for the arrival of autonomous cars, nothing but nothing is going to stand in the way of the rule makers who have decided we’re too stupid to drive.

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Via Hagerty UK

The post Opinion: Bad tech is killing off great cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of Toyota’s top U.S. execs, Jack Hollis, told the trade rag Automotive News recently that the company has “continued to look” at the small-truck segment, acknowledging that Toyota has “continued to look for a long time” even while others have acted. The Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz are two new entries in a once-sleepy corner of the market, and together they racked up over 50,000 sales in the first six months of 2022. Meanwhile, Toyota and Nissan, which practically invented the compact pickup in the 1970s and forged empires from their popularity in the ’80s and ’90s, seem to be dozing.

Those who look fondly on the truly compact pickups of yore, the Hardbodies and Hiluxes and LUVs, have suffered through a long drought. After Ford killed off the Ranger in 2012, the segment went into hibernation. Its main entries, the U.S.-built Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier, were left to molder from lack of competition, even as small-truck production soared overseas—especially in Thailand, where several automakers build new compact pickups for foreign markets (the U.S. is walled off from these by a 25 percent tariff on pickups).

The Ranger returned in 2019 to join the Chevy Colorado/GMC Canyon as “mid-sizers,” while the 2022 Frontier is all-new and the Tacoma finally gets an overhaul for 2024. Hollis promises that it won’t grow, but nor will it shrink to anything approaching what many consider to be peak Tacoma, those of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Those trucks, very hot items today in the resale market, were nearly a foot shorter, about 8 inches narrower, and roughly a thousand pounds lighter than the current Tacoma. Anybody wanting a pickup with that degree of garageability (and fuel economy) has only the Maverick or Santa Cruz as options. And those are not the body-on-frame workhorses of olden days but effectively four-door, car-based, crossover SUVs with exposed cargo areas.

Why can’t we have new little trucks? One answer: the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard. It has several inputs to its complex calculation, including sales of a particular model as well as the model’s footprint. When the formulas were rewritten in a 2008 revamp of CAFE, domestic automakers argued that they were unfairly penalized because their product mix tended toward large trucks (which are safer, they noted), especially the kinds of essential work trucks favored by the heartland. The argument, however patriotic, disguised a growing truth in 2008: Trucks were increasingly purchased as family vehicles. Nonetheless, light trucks and especially the higher footprint classes were let off the hook with lower fuel economy standards.

Seeing a loophole, automakers rushed to redesign more products to meet the incredibly broad definition of “light truck” specified in Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Today, vehicles ranging from the wee Honda HR-V to the Subaru Outback to traditional pickups like the F-150 are all classified as light trucks, the sales of which have consequently swelled to three-quarters of the U.S. light vehicle market.

The footprint rule endures, effectively discouraging carmakers from building body-on-frame trucks in smaller sizes owing to the cost and difficulty of meeting tougher mileage standards. Being car-based, the lighter Maverick and Santa Cruz (both circa 3800 pounds) skate through with four-cylinder engines and hybrid options. They’ll even tow up to 4000 and 5000 pounds, respectively. But buyers don’t have the kinds of choices in cabs and bed lengths that they once did with compact pickups.

Lovers of small trucks must pin their hopes on hybridization and electrification, two technologies that would make it easier for brands to reenter the segment. However, the prices of such trucks likely wouldn’t land far enough under those of full-size trucks to prevent most buyers from just stepping up to a larger offering. In the future, if you can even get a small pickup, you’ll have to pay through the nose for it.

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

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Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has targeted Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology, calling  it “one of the most dangerous and irresponsible actions by a car company in decades,” and calling for a federal recall to have the technology “removed in every Tesla.”

“Tesla should never have put this technology in its vehicles. Now over 100,000 Tesla owners are currently using technology that research shows malfunctions every eight minutes,” Nader said in a statement on his website, Nader.org.

The 86-year-old activist said he is “calling on federal regulators to act immediately to prevent the growing deaths and injuries from Tesla “manslaughtering” crashes with this technology. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has the authority to act swiftly to prevent such disasters. NHTSA has been investigating Tesla and its Full Self-Driving technology for several years. NHTSA must use its safety recall authority to order that the FSD technology be removed in every Tesla.

“This nation should not allow this malfunctioning software which Tesla itself warns may do the ‘wrong thing at the worst time’ on the same streets where children walk to school. Together we need to send an urgent message to the casualty-minded regulators that Americans must not be test dummies for a powerful, high-profile corporation and its celebrity CEO. No one is above the laws of manslaughter.”

Nader has been an outspoken critic of the automotive industry since his book, Unsafe at Any Speed The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, was released in 1965. (Nader made specific claims against the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair, which we put to the test.) Since then he has become a controversial, at times almost cartoonish advocate for safety in multiple arenas, culminating with a run for the Presidency.

Automakers reported nearly 400 crashes of vehicles with partially automated driver-assist systems, including 273 involving Teslas, according to statistics released in June by U.S. safety regulators, according to the Associated Press.

Automakers reported crashes from July of last year through May 15 under a mandate from NHTSA, which is examining such crashes broadly for the first time.

“As we gather more data, NHTSA will be able to better identify any emerging risks or trends and learn more about how these technologies are performing in the real world,” said Steven Cliff, the agency’s administrator.

NHTSA opened a formal investigation into Tesla Autopilot in August 2021.

Tesla, which no longer has a formal press office or PR department, has not responded to the Nader statement.

The post Nader: Tesla self-driving technology “dangerous and irresponsible” appeared first on Hagerty Media.

EPA levies fines on diesel exhaust companies

Intake: Red Deer Exhaust Inc. and Thunder Diesel & Performance Company are on the hook for a $1.6 million fine and must stop selling products that bypass vehicle emissions control systems in violation of EPA regulations, following a 2018 investigation. Red Deer, based in Alberta, Canada, manufactured the parts (notably the Flo~Pro Performance Exhaust) and Thunder Diesel, in Mountain Home, Arkansas, distributed them in the U.S.  The defeat device products they sold, more than 100,000 per year, were prohibited by the Clean Air Act and caused the vehicles to emit excess pollution. “Defeat devices violate Clean Air Act emissions requirements meant to protect public health and the environment, as well as vulnerable communities that are disproportionately impacted by air pollution,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division. “This settlement ensures that Flo~Pro will stop the sale of all defeat devices in the U.S. and is the latest reminder that the Department of Justice will hold the aftermarket automotive parts industry accountable for violations of federal anti-pollution laws.”

Exhaust: Thunder Diesel is no longer selling the defeat devices and is no longer in the aftermarket parts business at all; otherwise, the penalty levied by the U.S. government would have been even larger. These companies aren’t alone, as the EPA has been going after parts manufacturers that sell products that defeat or bypass emissions equipment—particularly diesel pickups. As much as we love to modify cars and trucks, emissions laws have made air quality so much better. Flouting those laws makes automotive enthusiasts as a group look bad, and from a health and safety standpoint we’re all better off without excess diesel fumes in the air. —Brandan Gillogly

Aston Martin to unveil two new models at Pebble Beach

Intake: Aston Martin will reveal a brace of British sports cars at its Club 1913 on Pebble Beach Golf Links during Monterey Car Week. First, the wraps will come off a limited edition car built by Aston’s Q Division to celebrate its tenth anniversary and simultaneously celebrate Bentley’s record at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It “encapsulates the brand’s winning track bloodline,” says Aston Martin. The second car will be a “new truly thrilling performance focused model which continues the high-octane emotion and intense driving pleasure defined by breath-taking new models such as the DBX707, V12 Vantage, and the uncompromising Aston Martin Valkyrie.” All will be revealed on August 19, and Aston Martin will also show the Valhalla with an updated interior design as well as the DBX707. It will also be the first major showcase for the company’s new logo and branding.

Exhaust: We don’t know what model the Q-car will be based on, but we rather suspect this will take a similar approach to the recent 007 editions, and therefore be a largely cosmetic treatment for an existing car. As for the new model, our money is on a V12 Vantage Roadster. Another good reason to visit Car Week, as if anybody needed one. —Nik Berg

Fernando Alonso to replace retiring Vettel at Aston Martin F1

Intake: Well, that didn’t take long: Aston Martin filled the seat vacated last week by the retiring Sebastian Vettel with another tousled-hair Formula 1 driver, Fernando Alonso. It’s a surprise but not a shock; Alonso has spoken previously with Canadian zillionaire Lawrence Stroll, the team owner and father of the other driver on the Aston roster, Lance Stroll.

Exhaust: The team strategy has always been about making Lance a better driver by pairing him with a veteran, and with Alonso on board Lance’s tutor goes from excellent to also excellent. Alonso just turned 41, and while this is a nice birthday present for him, it’s probably safe to say he has already figured his retirement into the Stroll package. He has 32 wins but none since 2013, and it may be unlikely he’ll get another, but like Vettel, he keeps Aston Martin’s name in the mix. Alonso’s departure from Alpine is an unexpected blow to the team, but easing the pain is the fact that Oscar Piastri waiting in the wings. With a little luck, Piastri is expected to be a star, and sliding into Alonso’s still-warm seat, if that happens, should accelerate his learning curve. —Steven Cole Smith

New MG roadster teased as it nears production

Intake: The MG Cyberster concept is edging closer to the road. When it arrives it will be the brand’s first sports car since being taken over by China’s SAIC and, understandably, the marketeers are quite excited so have titled a teaser video Return of the Legend. Unlike every previous MG roadster, this one will be all-electric albeit no less useable than its ancestors. The original concept was claimed to be able hit 62 mph in less than three seconds and yet still return a range of 500 miles on a full charge. Technical details haven’t been revealed, but the video does show a few changes to the design in readiness for production. The concept’s speedster styling has been tweaked and the car now appears to have a more conventional folding fabric roof, the wheels look smaller and the car looks to ride a bit higher as well. However, the scissor doors look to be staying and so does the yoke-style steering. There’s no confirmed launch date yet, but at this rate of progress we should expect to see it in 2023.

Exhaust: MG’s recent efforts in hatchbacks, sedans, and SUVs have been capable, if unexciting, but this shows the brand’s ambition—remember it wasn’t long ago that Kia and Hyundai were in the same boat, and now look at them. This may not convince the die-hard Teslarati to cancel their deposits for the much-delayed Roadster, but the MG’s adventurous styling and promised performance might just fit the bill for anyone else who fancies some open-air Euro EV fun. —NB

Toyota Gazoo Racing posts 2023 GR Cup season schedule

Intake: Yesterday, Toyota Gazoo Racing North America (TGRNA) unveiled its 2023 GR Cup schedule—a 14-race romp though the United States most iconic road courses (and one street course). International sports car racing sanctioning body SRO will oversee the seven dates, which will feature two races per weekend. The single-make series comprised completely of GR86 race cars, will open its inaugural season in March at Sonoma Raceway and end in October at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in October. If you’re a road racing diehard, you’ll find this schedule familiar; GR Cup will run as a support series to SRO’s Fanatec GT World Challenge America powered by AWS. Should you decide to attend, you’ll be treated to a bevy of SRO action, which includes its three other GT and TC undercards. TGRNA also announced the purses for the 2023 season. The group will award the top-eight finishers, up to $12,000 for the race winner, and 50,000 big ones for the season champion.

Exhaust: Toyota GR and SRO were smart to include GR Cup in SRO race weekends. There, the captive audience—who most-likely showed up to watch the wide-bodied sports cars in the GT World Challenge series—will be in attendance for the Toyota spec series. The run class will perform in front of an especially packed house when they invade Nashville for IndyCar’s Music City GP weekend. Should the series feature a decent car count, look for GR Cup to make waves early on. Spec Miata racing, especially at large tracks, always brings good spectators, what with bump drafting and frequent passing among a swarm of four-cylinder fury. We will see in March, at Sonoma. — Cameron Neveu

Mazda gets dirty with CX-50 Meridian Edition

Intake: Mazda has unveiled a more trail-ready version of its new CX-50 crossover, dubbed the Meridian Edition. The Meridian Edition slots just above the $38,425 CX-50 2.5 Turbo, ringing the register for $41,225. Opt for the package, and you’ll get 18-inch black alloy wheels and narrower 225 section-width Falken all-terrain tires, a new headlight garnish, a matte-black hood graphic, black wheel locks and lug nuts, and side rocker panels for added off-road protection. Spring for the Meridian-exclusive Apex Package ($1235) on top of that, and you’ll score roof-mounted black crossbars, a roof platform for mounting extra adventure gear, and front and rear splash guards. Mazda’s Polymetal Gray or Zircon Sand are the only paint choices here, and the only interior shade offered on the Meridian Edition is the new Terracotta leather with black interior accents. All Meridian Edition CX-50s will utilize Mazda’s 2.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine, good for 256 hp and 320 lb-ft of torque on 93 octane gas or 227 hp and 310 lb-ft on regular 87 octane fuel. Mazda’s i-Activ all-wheel drive is also standard here, as is the familiar six-speed automatic.

If the prospect of a sturdy roof rack is enticing but you don’t need that burlier rubber, the Meridian Choice package ($1899 dealer-installed) will offer those crossbars, roof platform, rocker protection, splash guards, black lug nuts, and the matte black hood graphic for whichever CX-50 trim level you choose. All trim levels of the Mazda CX-50 will jump $750 out the door, meaning the cheapest way into the svelte new crossover is now $28,825 including destination for the CX-50 2.5 S.

Exhaust: Our first-look review of this new ute showed that Mazda is off to a great start courting a more rugged, more practically minded buyer than before. (Those interested in optimal handling and a fuss-free interior can still get the delightful CX-5.) The Meridian Package will seek to build on that momentum, offering an even more trail-ready machine that looks fantastic to boot. The competition have all begun spinning up tire and graphics combos for their mid-sizers (hello, Honda Passport TrailSport), so why shouldn’t the CX-50 take advantage? Expect this to be a very popular package that we imagine will help pad Mazda’s margins. — Nathan Petroelje

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We’re sharing this report from our friends over at Hagerty UK. The legislation is surely troubling to bike enthusiasts across the pond. If you feel passionately about regulations of this sort gaining traction in the U.S. or Canada, it’s never a bad idea to reach out to your local elected representatives. –Ed.

 ***

An eerie silence is set to descend over motorcycle showrooms, from 2030. Sales of new petrol-powered mopeds and motorcycles are set to be banned from 2030 and 2035 respectively, the UK government has announced.

A consultation was launched yesterday, and will close on 21 September. However, most within the motorcycle and wider automotive industry expect it’s a foregone conclusion, given sales of combustion-powered cars are already set to end from 2030.

The government estimates there were 1.4 million motorcycles licensed for the road, in 2020. While some riders had hoped that new bikes would avoid any switch to electrification, the Department for Transport has said it doesn’t want bikes to continue with fossil fuel “as the rest of the vehicle fleet cleans up.”

It says: ‘Zero emission motorcycles and other powered two wheelers are an efficient and clean form of mobility that can reduce congestion, improve urban air quality and reduce noise – we will take forward measures to remove these emissions, including consulting on a date to end the sale of new non-zero emission motorbikes, ensuring we support the development of new industrial opportunities for the UK.’

In preparation, the DfT says it has earmarked £582 million for grants toward plug-in motorcycles, vans and taxis.

However, the Motorcycle Industry Association (MCIA) has criticized the government’s strategy. It says the bike industry needs more time to phase out larger, combustion-powered motorcycles, and says smaller, petrol-powered bikes are more efficient and cleaner than most electric cars.

“The Government has not considered the complexities of the L-Category sector in terms of what is and isn’t feasible when it comes to phasing out the other key segments of the market,” MCIA Chief Executive Tony Campbell said.

“The MCIA and its members will be continuing to push the case for why large capacity motorcycles need more time to phase out and are looking forward to fully engaging with the consultation process to ensure the best outcome for industry”.

However, Harley-Davidson has already brought an electric motorcycle to market—the Livewire. And British motorcycle brands are already working toward electrically powered large motorcycles. Norton has secured what it calls ‘significant funding’ funding from the Advanced Propulsion Centre to research and an electric motorbike satisfies the brand’s criteria for performance, touring range, and lightweight handling. Triumph, meanwhile, has been learning from its first prototype electric bike, the TE-1, which offers a 100 mile range, 175bhp kick and weighs 220 kg.

Those who have a craving for their first or indeed last petrol-powered motorbike now face the head-scratching moment where they’ll have to decide when to take the plunge, before such new bikes vanish from showrooms.

Via Hagerty UK

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Strange shotgun marriages happen in the cylinders of engines due to the intense heat and pressure of internal combustion. For example, nitrogen and oxygen are not naturally attracted to each other, chemically speaking, but they are thrown together by the detonation of fuel to produce oxides of nitrogen. Likewise, carbon and oxygen get it on during the explosion to form carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

Unusual pairings are also happening in the auto industry these days. Under intense pressure to increase electric vehicle output this decade, car companies hope to save money by sharing the multibillion-dollar costs of converting to electrification. In what is likely the biggest deal yet, General Motors and Honda announced back in 2020 that they would couple up to develop an electric crossover set to debut in 2027 with a highly ambitious price point of under $30,000. “By working together, we’ll put people all over the world into EVs faster than either company could achieve on its own,” said GM CEO Mary Barra.

GM has been in bed with Japanese automakers before, having produced cars with Toyota, Suzuki, and Isuzu at various times. Honda remained self-reliant during the wave of corporate mergers that rushed through the industry in the 1990s and 2000s, although the fiercely independent automaker did form some limited strategic partnerships. Perhaps you recall the 1993–2002 Honda Passport, which was built by Isuzu, or the 2004–07 deal in which Honda supplied GM with V-6 engines for the long-gone Saturn division.

It’s thought that GM’s early bet on battery development combined with Honda’s long experience in packaging and producing smaller vehicles at a profit will complement each other. Also, Honda is behind in electrification and surely needed a friendly partner outside of Japan, now that the demand seems to be rising for EVs. First-quarter 2022 EV registrations in the U.S. were up a startling 60 percent over the same period last year, totaling nearly 160,000 new battery-electric vehicles, or 4.6 percent of the market.

The first cars to appear under the GM-Honda alliance will be the Honda Prologue (get it?) in 2024, plus an EV for Honda’s luxury Acura division. The sub-$30,000 crossovers will come later as the industry works through the daunting cost disadvantages of electrics.

Meanwhile, Toyota has taken on multiple partners to speed EVs to market. In 2017, it formed an EV-development cooperative with Mazda, and starting this year, Subaru dealers will stock a $46,220 electric crossover called the Solterra, which is just a Toyota bZ4X wearing the thinnest of brand disguises.

Toyota’s motivation for sharing with Subaru may be that Subaru has barely touched its supply of tax incentives that rewards buyers of EVs with a $7500 federal tax credit. Each automaker can sell up to 200,000 electric and plug-in hybrids before the tax credit starts phasing out under a plan passed by Congress in 2008. Tesla and GM have hit the limit, and Toyota and Ford are expected to this year, but EV newcomer Subaru is only getting started (a proposal to drop the 200,000 limit and expand the credit to $12,500 appears dead in Congress).

Though some marriages may flourish, others are already on the skids. Last November, Ford broke off its engagement with electric pickup maker Rivian, ending their agreement, announced in 2019, to jointly develop an electric pickup and SUV. A few months later, Amazon—an early Rivian investor that had previously said it would buy 100,000 electric delivery vans from the startup by 2030—hopped into bed with Chrysler’s parent company, Stellantis, instead. The retail behemoth said it would purchase the company’s electric ProMaster van, due in 2023, as well as supply in-car software and cloud services. As Shakespeare observed, “Hasty marriage seldom proveth well.”

The post A surge in EV demand is sending automakers to the altar appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There have been dozens of silver-bullet solutions to the automotive industry’s problems over the years. However, once manufacturers, the public, and the government realize that some solutions not only fail but perpetrate the same toxic phenomenon, they take swift action.

Just kidding.

Regulatory bodies are infamous for moving at an ambulatory pace when it comes to managing toxins. The latest example is leaded gasoline. You thought that stuff left the market in the ’70s? Well, 1970’s Clean Air Act did set a deadline for its elimination, but that same law left a few loopholes, including one that, despite the known effects of leaded gasoline, has permitted the stuff to remain commonplace.

It’s harmed entire generations of Americans, too.

A recent video from Engineering Explained on YouTube brought up this topic. Jason Fenske, the channel’s host, cherry-picked some interesting data from two studies that looked deep into how large-scale exposure to this developmental neurotoxin has impacted our health. In the short term, the symptoms are not good. In long run, they’re even worse. The metric to which you should pay attention is blood-lead level (BLL): According to a study published in October 2021, over half the U.S. population—53 percent, to be exact—has increased levels of lead in their bloodstream. Lead exposure and IQ are inversely related, so this means that over half of Americans have lost some degree of intellectual capacity.

The usefulness of lead in the transportation industry is well-documented. Lead was actually a fuel substitute when first brought to market. Internal-combustion engines run more efficiently and make more power when the octane rating of their fuel is higher. In period, the first suggestion to leverage this was to introduce ethanol—the very stuff so many despise today—into the gasoline formula, but the price of ethanol made the idea prohibitively expensive. Enter Thomas Midgley and his tetraethyl lead additive in 1921. By 1923, refineries were adding TEL to gasoline at a ratio of 1 gallon TEL to every 1260 gallons of gas. Thus began our destructive love affair with lead.

Even in the ’20s, lead’s effect on the human body was no secret. Workers at the DuPont facility that made TEL had hallucinations so regularly that the factory floor was known as the “house of butterflies.” (That is an extremely concentrated environment, though; today, there certainly aren’t areas where a normal person would be exposed like that.) Then we realized how tailpipe emissions worked. Unfortunately, it was too late for those born between 1951 and 1980, nearly all of whom have blood-lead levels above the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) defined “toxic” amount of five micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL.)

The pre-boomer generation bore the brunt of lead exposure, but baby boomers didn’t fare much better. That generation suffered an average drop in IQ of 2.6 points, while those born between 1966 and 1970 likely lost 5.9. This same study found people born during that late-’60s timeframe whose blood-lead levels were as high as 25 μg/dL. (Again, literally any lead in the bloodstream is bad; the CDC simply set a reference line at 5 μg/dL. Five times a reference point that really means nothing because there should be no lead in the human bloodstream.)

When Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act into law in 1970, most considered the problem solved—after all, leaded gas was on the way out. Unfortunately, not until 1996 did lead or lead additives disappear from the gasoline Americans bought at the pump. Eventually the law bore fruit: Those born after the year 2000 show significantly lower amounts of lead in their bloodstream than in previous generations.

Interestingly, the average BBL of people born after 2000 is not zero. Why? A giant loophole in the Clean Air Act still allows the use of leaded gas.

Anyone familiar with fuels who is also into piston engines knows that aviation is the last bastion of leaded gas—and for good reason. The rules set forth by the Federal Aviation Administration are written in blood. Change isn’t accepted simply because someone thinks it’s a good idea; alterations are only made after methodical testing produces confirmed, dependable results. Planes cannot just fall out of the sky due to a seized engine or some fringe-case mechanical failure. Look into how planes are maintained and it’s easy to understand why flying cars will never be anything more than a fever dream for a few crazy folks. The masses can’t be bothered to look behind their cars when backing out of a parking spot, hence the rearview cameras required on all new vehicles since May of 2018. You expect them to do legit pre-flight checklists? Get outta here.

That “don’t change what isn’t broken” approach means that leaded fuel remains the standard choice for most recreational aircraft. The aviation community is entirely grounded in the tried-and-true. Many piston-powered planes produced today have designs that you could easily trace to the 1950s. Development rarely happens because the FAA’s certification process is so difficult and expensive. Add in the Boeing 737 MAX debacle, and the FAA is rightfully cautious. I agree that the FAA exists to create safe flying, and therefore understand the drawn-out process to approve these changes, but the FAA also has a responsibility to balance the safety of the persons in these small, piston-powered planes with the health of millions of persons on the ground. Hence why it started the EAGLE initiative earlier this year.

The Eliminate Aviation Gas Lead Emissions (EAGLE) program seems like a step in the right direction to further prioritize public health. The four-part plan falls apart pretty quickly, however, when you examine it from anything less than 10,000 feet. The first two steps are cited by the FAA as “industry led,” which is a cute way of kicking the can down the road. Developing the infrastructure required to make an honest effort to ditched leaded gas requires big money, money that would need to be invested by individuals or companies before the FAA would write policies about the use (or elimination) of leaded fuel or any alternatives. That dynamic alone discourages innovation, since otherwise-motivated companies have no assurance that the FAA will allow their investments to bear fruit.

To make the situation worse, a viable alternative to leaded gas already exists. Planes have been safely flying with it for 10 years—and the FAA has refused to take meaningful action in support of it.

General Aviation Modifications Incorporated (GAMI) has an unleaded 100-octane fuel (G100UL) whose supplemental type certification (STC) was only approved as of April 2022—and its use is still restricted to certain types of Lycoming-powered aircraft. The real struggle is that without wider approval from the FAA, access is basically null for anyone who wants to use the new G100UL fuel. To install a third pump (most airports only offer Jet-A and 100LL) at an airport requires a lot more than a tank and pump. The EPA would need to get involved, and the owner of the airport put up the money to make it all happen, all while hoping that this third option would sell at a volume that made it financially viable. There, too, G100UL faces an uphill battle: This leaded-gas alternative is projected to cost 60 to 85 cents more per gallon, as estimated by GAMI itself.

Yet this new fuel sits awaiting approval as the FAA pats itself on the back for trotting out the EAGLE program. The work is done, yet the progress that would help so many is stifled. It’s time for the FAA to move on the GAMI G100LL and other similar options rather than ordering another review by a technical advisory board, a requirement which GAMI has already sought and completed five times. Generations have lost reasoning ability due to lead exposure that continues to this day thanks to bureaucratic standards set forth in the name of safety. Whose safety?

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Carmakers and regulators are involved in a continual, ever-evolving game of tug-of-war. Perhaps the biggest indication of this reality is the significant gap separating a car’s vision—put forth by OEM design and engineering departments—and the reality that government restrictions will permit. When regulation happens unexpectedly, automakers sometimes are forced to compromise in less-than-ideal fashion: the MG B’s rubber bumpers and the impact-absorbing blocks Lamborghini fitted to the Countach, for example.

When German authorities tried to kill the original 911 Turbo’s spoiler, however, Porsche fought back—and won. We sat down with two former Porsche employees who remember the court battle to get the story.

Porsche first fitted a rear spoiler to the 911 when it unveiled the limited-edition Carrera RS 2.7 in 1972, and it’s this famous ducktail that has made a comeback several times since, most recently on the 2023 911 Sport Classic. We tend to take spoilers for granted in 2022; they’ve appeared on the humble Corolla and the brick-like Land Cruiser, not to mention everything in between, but they weren’t always ubiquitous. Spoilers and wings were nearly unheard of on street-legal cars five decades ago, and German authorities were caught completely off-guard by Porsche’s use of this racing-inspired innovation.

“[With the 911 Carrera 2.7 RS], the situation was so entirely new that the authorities didn’t know what to think of it, and Porsche only filed for a single approval of the ducktail. The authorities didn’t know how to respond [so they approved it],” Harm Lagaaij, Porsche’s former head of design, tells Hagerty.

Precisely 1580 examples of the 911 Carrera 2.7 RS were built, which isn’t exactly high volume model by any stretch of the imagination. The stakes increased when Porsche got moving on its much bigger plans for the 911 Turbo it aimed to release in 1975, when the ducktail morphed into the famous whale-tail. Let’s just say German authorities were not pleased to see yet another animalistic rear end in its homologation queue.

“We came with a new version and the authorities asked, ‘once more?’ We said, ‘why not? It’s good for aerodynamics,’ and they said ‘no,’” remembers Lagaaij.

Safety concerns were at the core of the problem.

“Authorities claimed that if the Porsche is stopped or moving slowly and a bicyclist hits it from behind, the rider might get hurt by hitting the spoiler,” explains Hermann Burst, who joined Porsche in 1969 to develop race cars (including the 917) and later worked on street-legal cars, like the 911 Carrera RS 2.7.

Porsche took these concerns seriously. It performed crash tests using dummies to verify the claims, and it even redesigned the spoiler with a rubber-like edge in a bid to get the green light for production.

None of these efforts changed the government’s position.

“The president of the highway authority said that he felt the upper edge of the spoiler was still very edgy, and he felt it was hard enough to break the arm or the ribs of a person hitting it,” Burst tells me.

Porsche pointed out that roof racks and ski racks also had sharp edges yet they were approved for road use, but its argument fell on deaf ears. Releasing the 911 Turbo without a spoiler was out of the question for Porsche; this was a functional piece essential to performance, not a superfluous, attention-seeking outgrowth of a designer’s imagination. The downforce it produced helped keep the rear end in contact with the pavement at high speeds.

Faced with no other option, Porsche sued the Federal Republic of Germany. Its defense team argued that the spoiler didn’t make the 911 Turbo more dangerous than a standard 911, and the arguments it presented were backed up by the opinion of a medical professor. The court agreed in Porsche’s favor. The memory of this triumph is enough to make Lagaaij smile today. He says that the automaker never ran into spoiler-related issues again.

“[The victory] meant that, once this particular spoiler was approved, the motorsport people could start asking for even bigger spoilers,” he says. “Which, of course, is precisely what happened,” he adds.

Porsche wasn’t the only company whose spoiler plans were nearly, uh, spoiled by regulations. BMW faced a similar problem with the aerodynamic package it made available for the E9-based 3.0 CSL. Rather than go to court, it cleverly delivered cars with the spoiler in the trunk rather than on the trunk lid. Buyers had to install it after taking delivery, so it wasn’t standard equipment and thus didn’t need to be approved.

Regulators aren’t going to stop regulating, of course. But once in a while, the right pair of scissors is all it takes to cut through the red tape.

The post German regulators almost killed the original 911 Turbo’s whale-tail spoiler appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The default start mode on Ferrari’s SF90 Stradale is silent. Keep going without firing up the V-8, however, and you’ll run out of juice after just 16 miles.

That’s probably not enough to get you to the local coffee shop, let alone your nearest cars and coffee meetup, yet this level of EV range is typical for today’s hybrid hypercars.

Why so little? Blame the Europeans.

Carmakers are under huge pressure to put the internal combustion engine on ice. In the European Union, new fossil fuel-powered cars will be banned from 2035. Here in the United Kingdom it’s 2030, and in the meantime they’re being forced to meet ever stricter, emissions, economy, and noise regulations.

When your business is powerful, noisy, high-performance vehicles meeting these restrictions is getting tougher and tougher. Fail to meet the requirements and car makers face massive fines. Every single gram per kilometer of carbon dioxide over the limit results in a penalty of €95 ($100)—and that’s paid on every car produced. Currently the limit is 95 g/km but that will be cut by a further 15 percent in 2025 and then an additional 37.5 per cent from 2030 until the 2035 deadline for ICE vehicles to be abandoned.

Then there’s noise. In cities like London and Paris audio-triggered cameras are being set up to catch drivers whose cars are too loud. In one year alone 10,000 London drivers were hit with fines, with a Lamborghini owner being nailed as the loudest at 112.98 decibels.

The exotic manufacturers need a workaround, and they need it now. That’s where these hybrids come in. Really, they’re just a way to game the system.

By mapping software to the official test cycles Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, and others can achieve miracles. In a lab, at least. Take the latest Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid as a prime example. It will travel just 26 miles on a fully-charged battery alone before its 2.9-liter twin turbo V-6 has to kick in. Nonetheless that’s sufficient to produce only 75 g/km of CO2 on the WLTP test cycle and a combined economy of 3.3l/100 km (equivalent to 71 mpg U.S). By contrast the V-8 Flying Spur produces 270 g/km and the W-12 a hefty 320 g/km and a U.S. combined economy of 15-19 mpg.

Reality on the road is, of course, rather different to the laboratory and Bentley’s high-flying hybrid will probably only see 25 mpg on longer journeys—but it beats the system and lets the British brand keep selling without penalty until electrification becomes inevitable.

While Bentley performance is built around being effortless, for other exotics the soundtrack is as important as speed, and that is also under threat—in city centers at least. Partial electrification offers an escape route.

“Owners asked for the ability to drive in electric-only mode—a feature which was not initially available on our first hybrid car, the LaFerrari, but which was made the default start mode for the SF90 Stradale due to client demand. It seems our clients appreciate driving in electric-only mode in city centers, presumably because it is more socially acceptable to do so,” Ferrari spokesman Jason Harris told Hagerty.

Ferrari and others may have framed their electrification antics as being about performance—and the instant torque of electric motors certainly add speed, but make no mistake, the only reason it’s happened is to beat a flawed testing system.

Now where have we heard of that before?

The post Blame Europe for “socially acceptable” hybrid hypercars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We always want what we can’t have—maybe it’s one of those lizard-brain reactions that can’t be helped. For car enthusiasts, foreign-market performance cars have long been such an object of desire.

You’re probably aware that we in the U.S. can gain access to those forbidden-fruit Skylines and Silvias once they become older than 25 years of age. Whether you’re importing actual fruit, cars, or anything else, however, very specific rules must be followed. With collector cars, these rules create pent-up demand, motivating less-than-scrupulous importers to take shortcuts. Such was the case brought earlier this month against Andres Diaz, President of SOHO Alliance LLC of Pembroke Pines, Florida, and his associate, Nicole Chiong, who are alleged to have committed 348 instances of fraud in applying for titles for vehicles the company imported.

Not only has SOHO’s auto dealer license been revoked, but the Florida titles of those 348 cars have been as well, rendering those cars legally unable to operate in the state of Florida and subject to additional Federal import investigation.

Sean Morris is not the least bit surprised by last week’s events. As a third-generation vehicle importer and Director at Toprank International Vehicle Importers, Morris knows a thing or two about the proper way to bring a vehicle to U.S. shores. He’s also known for his involvement in sourcing cars for the Fast & Furious movie franchise, and has created numerous online resources for those interested in importing cars.

“There are plenty of people who will put a car in a container and not declare it,” Morris said. “If they’re playing the numbers, there’s a really good chance they won’t get popped for a long time.” He’s right—shipping industry studies estimate only 3-5 percent of the 11 million-plus shipping containers that enter the U.S. annually are inspected.

Those same people are all too happy to sell their wares to undereducated buyers. “[Some importers] will tell buyers that since it’s state titled, it’s good to go, but that doesn’t mean the work has been done to legally import the car,” Morris added. “Buyers are easily convinced by someone that there’s a loophole because how else could they have a car here?”

Morris indicated that some buyers are willfully aware of the shortcuts being taken while others are simply don’t put in the due diligence necessary to verify that all the proper steps have been completed. What’s more, any subsequent sales after the first Stateside owner can further muddy the waters—absent retaining all the proper importing documentation (not to mention knowing exactly what paperwork to look for), it can become increasingly challenging to ensure that the R32 you just bought won’t suddenly cause Homeland Security to come calling. Yes, you read that right: If the Feds discover that your vehicle was not properly imported, even if you are a subsequent owner who had nothing to do with the importing process, that car may be subject to seizure.

If the Feds do come a-knocking, there is almost no recourse. An illegally-imported car is unlikely to be crushed—that’s typically a publicity stunt reserved for high-profile cases—but it may be seized and auctioned, after which it must go to a country that does not touch U.S. borders. It may be exported, but customs may seize it at the dock, and the VIN will never be able to be legally imported back into the States. According to the press release from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, it may be possible to retain a vehicle in non-operating status, but few owners have the luxury of turning their garage into a static museum.

For those of us in the collector car hobby, the SOHO case highlights a larger problem than those 348 cars. Our data show a dramatic increase in imported cars from Japan since 2016, with Japanese brands averaging more than 700 of the approximately 1100 cars now coming to our shores monthly. Demand has surged, and highly-motivated people willing to cut corners have taken notice—Morris believes there are significantly more illegal cars out there than just the ones highlighted in this case. Vehicle provenance has always played a role in valuing collector cars, but in this instance it can mean the difference between an appreciating asset you can enjoy and a very costly headache made from metal, rubber, and plastic.

So what's a lover of JDM masterpieces (or any other foreign-market vehicles) to do? The solution is the last word anyone likes to hear: homework.

First, check the reputation of the importer or dealer. Understand their history and reputation in the marketplace. This may sound basic, but it can save you from future hassle. Having established you're working with a solid firm, it's now time to begin your due diligence. This is still true if you plan to bid on an imported car at auction. Reputable houses have crack staff who will do everything they can to ensure that all listings are trouble-free, but issues can still sneak through.

Next, the friendly folks at NHTSA have a vehicle importing page that offers guidelines—these are worth reading whether you're importing a car or buying one that's already arrived. Paperwork is the name of the game. The seller of a car properly imported under the 25-year rule should be able to produce a copy of the following four forms: NHTSA form HS7, EPA form 3520-1, Customs Entry Summary form 7501 and Entry/Immediate Delivery Document 3461. Absence of these documents should be a giant red flag to any prospective buyer. Many states will require this paperwork to title and register your new ride.

Even after importation, the process may not be over. In California, which has heavily regulated emissions standards, you will also need to make sure that the vehicle you are buying has been brought into compliance and is accompanied by a BAR label showing it meets CARB requirements. If you live elsewhere, check with your state to see if they have any additional requirements.

Cars produced less than 25 years ago can be legally imported, but only if they qualify under the Show or Display rule. These cars must meet a very tight set of requirements even to be considered for application to the approved list. If not specifically included, then the vehicle is not eligible for early import. How specific are the requirements? Well, if you want to import an R34 Skyline GT-R, the only ones approved through Show or Display are the 1999 Skyline GT-R V-Spec finished in Midnight Purple II or the 2002 Skyline GT-R M-Spec Nür. Last but not least, if you're buying a Show or Display car that is already in the country, you will need to re-apply with NHTSA as the new owner.

Sound like a lot of work? It is. Most of us don't have the time or inclination to become experts—or even coherent—in U.S. import law. The more practical route is to hire an attorney who specializes in auto importation. This will add cost, but you're already anteing up to buy your dream car, so it's worth the peace of mind you'll get knowing a flatbed operator armed with seizure documents isn't going to one day show up in your driveway. No matter if you're the first, third, or tenth prospective owner of an imported car, it's critical to vet the vehicle's legality. Finally, don't be fooled by anyone who suggests there's a shortcut to be had—it's almost certainly too good to be true.

The post Florida’s import fraud crackdown is a cautionary tale for collectors appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Consider the door officially open for road-legal turnkey replica cars. After years of arduous waiting, small-volume manufacturers are now able to start selling replicas built to resemble the makes and models from 25 years ago or longer.

Originally written into law in 2015, the Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act was designed to protect small, ambitious automakers by providing a regulatory path that would allow them to build and sell replicas of older vehicles not meeting ordinary federal safety laws. The paperwork then sat in stasis, passing a December 2016 deadline until litigious action by SEMA jumpstarted NHTSA in October of 2019. Roughly two years later, now that NHTSA has finalized regulations to implement the law, the wait is finally over.

This is an enormous win for small businesses and entrepreneurs in the automotive sector. Now, low-volume manufacturers will be able to make, import, and sell up to 325 vehicles per year. The law effectively creates a second vein of government oversight—apart from the heavily regulated one applying to large-scale OEMs—that is designed specifically for boutique manufacturing.

“SEMA applauds NHTSA’s final rule allowing companies to market classic-themed cars,” said Daniel Ingber, SEMA Vice President of Government Affairs. “Regulatory barriers have previously prevented small automakers from producing heritage cars that are coveted by consumers. The roadblocks have been eliminated. This is a hard-fought victory for enthusiasts, small volume manufacturers, their suppliers, and all the men and women who will be hired to fill new jobs created by this law.”

It’s not a total free-for-all, of course. Any replicas made and sold must adhere to modern emissions standards, according to NHTSA. Additionally, all low-volume manufacturers must register with NHTSA, EPA, and CARB before selling vehicles.  According to SEMA, that process may take several months. Approved manufacturers will be required to submit annual production reports.

The final ruling does contain a few deviations from the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), submitted back in January 2021. Two main changes of note: First, registrants will no longer have to submit documentation or possess a license to the intellectual property necessary to make a replica vehicle, but simply certify to the fact. Second, replicas won’t be required to maintain the exact dimensions of the original vehicle in question, but rather maintain a 10 percent over/under.

Official recognition and regulation of low-volume automotive manufacturing is long overdue. We look forward to the talented creations that will come out of this new opportunity for automotive enthusiasm to flourish.

The post Replica car construction can officially commence appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Welcome to The Manifold, our fresh daily digest of news and what’s happening in the car world.

Cayenne Turbo GT is a hefty, heroic track weapon

Intake: Porsche just unveiled a new sporting variant of its Cayenne SUV, the Turbo GT. It’s meant to be the crown jewel of the Cayenne lineup, with a ridiculously powerful twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 that boasts 631 hp and 626 lb-ft, gains of 90 ponies and 59 twists over the regular Cayenne Turbo Coupe. Performance figures are appropriately bonkers: 0–60 in 3.1 seconds, quarter-mile in 11.6, and top speed of 186 mph. Porsche’s deft tuning helped the Cayenne Turbo GT blitz the Nürburgring Nordschleife in just 7:38.9, a new official SUV lap record for the 12.9-mile full course. Expect to see it in dealer showrooms early next year, starting at $182,150.

Exhaust: This one’s gonna rip. Whenever Porsche aims its performance might at one of  its models, the end result is almost always remarkable. For our money, we’re getting in line over at club 911 GT3, but as the Cayenne outsells the 911 by more than two to one, there’s a not insignificant chance this high-po variant outsells the spicier 911s by a similar margin. For our review of the Turbo GT prototype, click here. 

Super summer news for A70/A80 Supra owners

Intake: Toyota’s GR Heritage Parts department has just announced a run of remanufactured spare parts for the A70 and A80 Supra, serving Japanese and North American enthusiasts. Available from Toyota dealers, while stocks last, will be a selection of components to keep these JDM classics on the road. The A70 is best served with a clutch master cylinder, clutch release cylinder, brake and heater hoses, A/C control-panel knob, front emblem, side-protection moldings, rear emblem, front door trim and front suspension lower arm bush being made available between July and August. The A80 will have its oxygen sensor and front bumper on sale at the same time.

Exhaust: Toyota Supras have an arsenal of fandom behind them, whether they’re selling for a Fast and Furious fortune or the waiting to their moment as is the A70. This factory support is great news and shows that big corporations can care! 

Fancy a fly-drive in Slovakia?

Intake: A Slovakian professor has built a BMW-powered car that both drives and flies. It actually proved its capability by flying between Nitra and Bratislava—a distance of 60 miles. The AirCar runs on regular pump fuel and its inventor Professor Stefan Klein claims it can fly for 600 miles at up to 8200 feet. It takes just over two minutes to switch from air to ground mode, with its narrow wings performing a little ballet as they swing up, round and down to be stowed inside the body. The tail then retracts to shorten the vehicle’s length for driving on the road. In the air, the BMW engine powers a pusher propeller and, judging from the video of it in flight, the wheels seem to rotate as well. Sensibly, the prop gets disengaged for driving. Professor Klein says that he’s notched up 40 hours of air time so far and hopes to get it certified for commercial use soon.

Exhaust: We’ve been promised flying cars for decades, but there’s a real renewed interest right now, so hopefully this will be more than a fly-by-night effort.

How L.A. weather, a Wrangler, and a 21-year-old nanny influenced the 2020 Bronco’s door design

Intake: A dissatisfied Wrangler owner indirectly set Ford designers on a quest to optimize the open-air personality of its resurrected, sixth-gen Bronco, reports Automotive News. As a nanny living in Los Angeles, 21-year-old Bianca had every reason to enjoy the West Coast weather but no garage of her own in which to store her Wrangler’s doors after she removed them. Ford’s team rejiggered hinges, fiddled with mounting points, and even relocated the Bronco’s sideview mirrors in a painstaking quest to preserve the compact, agile shape of the 2020 Bronco while ensuring owners could easily unbolt and stow the doors in the truck—with factory-provided protective bags and rubber bumpers.

Exhaust: Ford’s design team showed its dedication to one-upping the Wrangler by tackling an ergonomic headache itself, rather than leaving it to the aftermarket. (Wrangler owners, if they aren’t willing to cram the doors into the rear seats, must get creative with garage-mounted racks or even a cart.) The Bronco’s stowable doors will give their owners bragging rights over Wrangler customers, and are a telling mark of how far the Bronco has come in six generations: The original base model, the roadster, didn’t even have doors—or a roof, for that matter.

Chevrolet confirms Silverado ZR2 with teaser video

Celebrating those who love the mud. Tune in this fall to see what's new from #Silverado. pic.twitter.com/MUYoEUyBZa

— Chevy Trucks (@ChevyTrucks) June 30, 2021

Intake: We’ve seen spy photos for quite a while, but this video confirms the wildest off-road trim for Silverado will follow in the footsteps of its compact, mid-sized brethren and wear the ZR2 badge. We can’t make out many details, but we do know that the rear suspension will be leaf-spring, as opposed to the Ram TRX and current-generation Raptor, which both use coils.

Exhaust: The Colorado ZR2 has made quite a name for itself, and it’s apparent Chevy feels that ZR2 is becoming a brand of its own. With the Raptor and TRX starting at $64K and $70K, respectively, Chevrolet might see a way to offer a more affordable entry to that level of full-size off-road capability. As it stands, Chevy offers the Trail Boss, the Silverado’s current top off-road package, in both Custom and LT trims, but on the Colorado, ZR2 is a trim of its own. If the fantastic off-road demeanor of the Colorado ZR2 is any indication, Chevrolet will have a serious competitor to the Raptor, but we doubt this Silverado will pack the kind of power needed to woo TRX buyers—at least, not at first.

Study puts EV and ICE carbon emission factors under the microscope

Intake: Reuters recently conducted an analysis on Argonne National Laboratory’s GREET (Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies) model, a resource used by the EPA and other regulatory bodies to shape government policy. Findings show that in general, producing an EV creates a greater upfront carbon footprint than a gasoline powered vehicle, primarily due to the amount of mineral extraction and processing required in EVs. Therefore, a certain amount of time or mileage must elapse until your traditional gas-powered car begins to outpace the carbon footprint of an EV. This is especially true when certain nations rely more heavily upon a coal-fired electricity grid. The analysis notes that a greener nation like Norway will achieve break-even sooner, as opposed countries like China or Poland that rely more heavily on coal. The two vehicles chosen by Reuters in their comparison were a Tesla Model 3 (54kWh), and Toyota Corolla (33 mpg). In the U.S., where 23 percent of the nation’s energy is derived from coal, one would have to drive the Corolla at least 13,500 miles (~1 yr) before the initial advantage over the new Model 3 was lost. In Norway, that number lowers to 8400 miles (~6 months). However, in China and Poland, where electrical charging is much dirtier, mileage climbs up to 78,700 miles (~5 yrs).

Exhaust: Quantitatively speaking, in the long run, there’s plenty to like about the oncoming EV movement by the numbers for the environmentally attune. However, while there’s no denying that at a certain point EVs outpace gas vehicles in terms of carbon impact, many questions still linger as to the preparedness of nations to safely, ethically, and environmentally recycle lithium-ion components en masse once they’ve met their end. The need for holistic, big-picture research—along with considerable infrastructure investment to make EVs a viable alternative for mainstream customers to actually consider—are essential.

The post Porsche’s 631-hp über Cayenne, factory heritage parts for Supra, Slovakian car takes to the skies appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Curtailing tailpipe emissions is a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s clean-air strategy, and some lawmakers have pushed for a phase-out of gasoline and diesel vehicles within the next couple decades.

It’s nearly impossible to find industry experts or environmentalists who think such a ban would spell the end for classic cars, but growing sentiment against the internal combustion engine could cause collectors headaches in years to come.

An Environmental Protection Agency official told Hagerty Insider that the current wave of legislation and rule-making is aimed at mandating standards for new cars. “The public policy focus is on the future fleet, and what it will look like, especially on the pace of electrification,” this official said.

President Joseph Biden has announced plans to consider toughening emissions standards, subsidizing car-charging infrastructure and creating “alternative-fuel corridors.” But Biden, the son of a car salesman and a collector himself, hasn’t shown an appetite to slap new rules at his fellow enthusiasts.

While federal decision makers focus on the future, local lawmakers and politicians do have the power to mess with history. Among the buzziest examples is London’s designation of a low-emissions zone. Zero-emissions zones are either in the works or in discussion in Berkeley, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, with officials looking at outright bans to forcing delivery services to only use battery-electric vehicles. Internationally, there are plans for experimentation with zero-emissions zones in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Seoul, Oslo, and Auckland. It’s worth noting the U.K.’s green-car regulations generally have exceptions for classic cars, but opponents say such exemptions might not extend to newer classics.

“These things have a way of spreading,” Malcolm McKay, an automotive writer working in leadership of the newly formed Historic & Classic Vehicles Alliance in the U.K., said. Many of the tools regulators use to clean up roads, including smog tests, could someday discourage those wanting to begin collecting.

McKay noted there are a lot of new mandates emerging that impose hefty fees on classic car owners and seriously cripple the jobs and income that the hobby supports. Some currently may affect a particular class of vehicles, such as diesel vans, trucks or small busses, but “the danger is that this sort of rulemaking starts expanding. It’s something we have to monitor all the time.”

And let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: Classics do pollute. The average vehicle sold in U.S. dealerships (car or truck) achieves roughly 25 miles per gallon, traveling about twice as far on the same amount of fuel as a car built when the EPA first started tracking corporate average fuel economy in the early 1970s. A host of technological advances and new components, meanwhile, has caused the grams of carbon dioxide per gallon to plummet over the past 30 years.

“Emissions of classics are terrible compared to a modern vehicle,” David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said.

Shelie Miller, a professor who directs the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment, recently studied the emissions created during Detroit’s annual Woodward Dream Cruise, a gathering of tens of thousands of motorists driving classics down the Motor City’s main drag. Her conclusion: The event has a carbon footprint of roughly 400 metric tons of C02, nearly equivalent to the annual footprint of eight U.S. households.

Miller, however, notes these types of gatherings are not representative of a typical classic-car utilization, or contribution to climate change. While transportation is estimated to be responsible for one-third of all global warming, she said, that label encompasses all the ways people get from Point A to Point Z—ranging from scooters and semis to planes and trains. Classics contribute a miniscule share.

“Generally, they’re not your daily driver and the mileage is going to be limited,” Cooke said. The Federal Highway Administration estimates a Class 8 truck is driven more than 60,000 miles annually, meaning a semi clocks more mileage in two weeks than a classic car travels in the typical year. (The average classic vehicle insured with Hagerty gets driven 2212 miles a year.)

Also working in classic cars’ favor is that they’re relatively rare. As we’ve reported before, the natural attrition of older cars means the vast majority of the older “guzzlers” have already left the road.

That said, newer cars are more durable—a concern from a climate standpoint, Cooke said. Today’s vehicles last longer but corporate average fuel economy improvements have barely budged over the past decade. That means that the “long tail” of vehicle emissions isn’t getting meaningfully shorter with each new model year.

Number crunchers are hard at work trying to estimate the ideal lifespan for a vehicle, Miller said. Recycle a car too soon, and a lot of the energy used to make that car will be wasted; wait too long, and its poor emissions performance will outweigh the value of keeping it alive.

Reliable older cars benefit lower-income Americans needing reliable transportation, which is good for the economy but arguably bad for the environment. This can lead to a tricky balancing act for those trying to weigh a collector’s interests against environmental goals.

In 2004, for instance, then-California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (who, like President Biden, counts a car salesman for a father and claims classic-car enthusiast status) drew criticism from collectors—including Jay Leno—for coming up with the idea to expand smog checks to progressively older vehicles over time. The rule had been cars 29 years and under had to be checked, but her proposal locked in the grandfather clause only for cars built before 1975.

As the years have gone on, the cars eligible for smog checks have gotten older and older. This, along with the state’s older-vehicle recycling incentives, help cut off faster the “long tail” of emissions Cooke referenced.

Nevada Assemblyman Howard Watts, representing residents of Las Vegas and surrounding cities, said legislators need to be careful not to punish collectors when trying to take old cars off the road, or force repairs to maintain healthy emissions levels. His recent bill, aimed at reducing the amount of Nevadans registering classic-car plates, has been signed into law.

About a decade ago, Nevada started allowing owners of vehicles 20 years or older to obtain these plates. The number of such plates has ballooned, from 5000 to 6000 cars in 2011 to about 30,000 now. Why? A classic plate exempts you from a smog check as long as you commit to driving less than 5000 miles annually.

“Over the years, word got around that the world’s worst kept secret is the DMV has no way of enforcing the 5000-mile limit,” Watts said.

“So you find there are low-income folks running a small landscaping company out of someone’s house and using a beat-up F-150 with a classic plate on it. Or someone is driving a 1990-something Toyota Camry and there is nothing classic about it but it’s got a classic plate … we had to close the loophole (and) keep the integrity of the classic plate.”

The solution is to require anyone with a classic plate to carry classic-car insurance, a move that most serious hobbyists have already made, he said. To help lower-income drivers make repairs or replace cars after failing an emissions test, legislators approved a small smog-check fee that will soon go into place. McKay, with the U.K.’s Historic & Classic Vehicles Alliance, said protecting enthusiasts from rules perceived to unfairly target classic cars can be as much about fighting well-meaning but misguided lawmakers as it is about fighting public opinion. Recently, as London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s aggressive stance against internal-combustion-engine vehicles has gained traction, classic-car owners have seen a shift in sentiment. “Some have really noticed a difference,” he said. “Instead of being stopped in a parking lot and told ‘what a lovely car,’ now it’s a question. They say ‘that is a really polluting car, isn’t it?’”

The post Out of gas? What green regulations could mean for classics appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has finally completed regulations that permit low-volume motor vehicle manufacturers to begin selling replica cars. The Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act, which then-President Barack Obama signed into law in 2015, allows the manufacture and sale of cars that resemble vehicles produced at least 25 years ago. It was delayed while awaiting the NHTSA regulations; the original deadline was set for December 4, 2016.

In October 2019, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) ran out of patience and filed suit with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California, asking the court to compel the NHTSA to act. In December 2019, the government agency did exactly that. Thirteen months later, replica car businesses will be allowed to construct up to 325 reproduction cars per year (subject to federal regulatory oversight).

SEMA President and CEO Christopher J. Kersting applauded the long overdue move. “Regulatory barriers have previously prevented small automakers from producing heritage cars for eager customers,” Kersting said in a press release. “The roadblocks have been eliminated. Companies will be able to hire workers, start making necessary parts and components, and produce and sell cars.”

Prior to the Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act, the U.S. had just one system for regulating automobiles, which was designed for companies that mass-produce millions of vehicles. The new program recognizes the unique challenges faced by companies that produce a small number of custom cars.

According to the NHTSA, the vehicles are required to meet current model year emissions standards. The regulation does not take effect until it is officially published in the Federal Register. Low-volume vehicle manufacturers will then be required to register with NHTSA, EPA, and CARB before selling vehicles and thereafter submit annual reports on vehicle productions.

Enthusiasts still have the option to build a car from a kit or create their own home-built replicas, but soon they may also purchase a turn-key replica car.

The post NHTSA finally releases regulations, opening door to road-legal historic replica cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Porsche is about to add “energy provider” to its resume.

Earlier in 2020, the German automaker caught us off-guard by announcing a significant investment in the development, production, and distribution of a synthetic fuel that can replace gasoline. Porsche sees this project as a way to keep classic cars on the road when and if fossil fuels are banned around the world. Bolstered by funding from Germany’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, it’s shifting the project into high gear. It teamed up with Siemens Energy, among other partners, to begin building a pilot factory in Chile, and it plans to start distributing its synthetic fuel in the coming years.

Intrigued, we talked with Michael Steiner, Porsche’s research and development boss, and Karl Dums, its head of advanced powertrain development and powertrain strategy, to learn more about the project’s ins and outs.

Why go synthetic?

Porsche’s main reason for investing nearly $25 million into the first phase of the project is simple. Regulators in Europe are making a concerted effort to jawbone gasoline and diesel out of the auto industry as quickly as possible.

“We have here in Europe the so-called Green Deal, which directs Europe in the direction of sustainability. We have targets for the automotive sector that are really tight. Synthetic fuels could help reduce the CO2 footprint of our automotive sector in Europe. This is one driver,” Steiner explained during a virtual roundtable discussion.

And yet, lawmakers are venerating electric cars as a one-size-fits-all solution. In Europe, the flat-six, the V-8, and even the turbo-four are racing towards extinction in the not-too-distant future. Some argue these blanket bans are nonsense on stilts, while others welcome them like a well-stocked Christmas basket. Regardless of your view on this polarizing topic, the bottom line is that Porsche won’t be allowed to sell a gasoline-burning 911 anywhere in the United Kingdom after 2030. Volkswagen’s current and eighth-generation Golf GTI will likely be the last one British motorists can buy new—unless laws change, of course. Synthetic fuels haven’t entered the regulatory framework in a meaningful way yet, and that’s the second big reason why Porsche is moving forward with the project.

“The second driver is that politicians in Germany, as well as in Brussels, are discussing whether synthetic fuels will be allowed. Until someone shows what’s technically possible, and what effect importing synthetic fuels instead of fossil fuels has on sustainability, there could be no regulations allowing such things. We see a need for a real showcase to convince regulators that there should be room regulation-wise for synthetic fuels,” he told us.

From Chile, via ExxonMobil

Convincing international regulators that enthusiasts should be allowed to deviate from the EV fantasyland by firing up a 1974 Porsche 914 or a 1988 GMC Suburban once a week requires proving that synthetic fuels are made and transported in a sustainable manner. That’s why Porsche and its partners have chosen to put their first factory in southern Chile. You’d be hard-pressed to find a location that’s farther from Stuttgart, unless you sail down to Antarctica, but you’d also be hard-pressed to find one that’s so reliably windy, and wind-driven turbines will power the facility. Called Haru Oni, and shown above in a sketch, it’s currently under construction. Meanwhile, executives from Porsche and its partners are still hammering out the transportation-related details with key players in the maritime industry.

Once it disembarks in Europe, the synthetic fuel (a name for which hasn’t been decided yet) will be licensed to and supported by ExxonMobil. It’s a liquid, just like gasoline and diesel, so the firm will be able to distribute it via standard fuel pumps. It’s not too far-fetched to speculate the government’s blessing—assuming it’s received—will be accompanied by a tax; nothing suggests global leaders will brush aside such a piquant opportunity to make money. In turn, the type and amount of taxes applied to the synthetic fuel will dictate its cost to consumers.

“If you look at the price of fuel here in Europe, we’re paying between €1 and €2 per liter,” said Steiner. “In the mid-term, we see a chance to come close to this range in terms of cost before taxes are factored in, and this is very important. Its competitiveness in terms of price at the gas station will depend mainly on the question of what is the price tag for CO2, and how this new fuel will be taxed,” he warned.

For context, €1 per liter represents about $4.58 per gallon, while €2 is $9.16. Even without taxes, this fuel won’t be cheap. Whether it comes to the United States, where regulations are currently looser than on the other side of the pond, remains to be seen. Europe is the project’s target market as of this writing, but an American launch hasn’t been ruled out. Don’t forget that California wants to limit new car sales to zero-emissions models by 2035 at the latest.

Gasoline 2.0

Assuming the much-debated gasoline bans are enacted, and assuming Porsche’s synthetic fuel is elevated as a suitable replacement, what’s next? Nothing out of the ordinary, at least. You’d start your 911 back it out of your garage, drive to the nearest gas station, and fill it up just like you’ve always done.

“Our fuel specifications meet exactly the existing ones, so you could burn such fuel in a 993 without damaging the engine, and without making mechanical adjustments to it,” he said. What if you have, say, a Mercedes-Benz 300E? “I should not make assessments about other engines from other brands, but in Porsche cars it will work.”

Dums displayed more optimism about the possibility of putting Porsche fuel in a Benz.

“We are pretty sure that we meet the specifications, and therefore this fuel should work in every car which uses fuel within the existing specifications,” he replied. He also downplayed concerns about a decade’s worth of synthetic fuel chewing the valves. “I think the fuel quality is good enough that there are no long-term effects. As you know, fossil fuels also have some tolerances, and we don’t expect more effects than we have right now. Even less,” he stressed.

Right around the corner

Porsche CEO Oliver Blume previously sketched the outline of a fuel made by producing hydrogen, capturing carbon from the air, and combining both elements to end up with methanol, which is then transformed into a substitute for gasoline. It sounds science fiction-esque, but it’s happening, and it’s coming sooner than you might think.

“Our pilot plant will produce fuel in two years. We’ll have a capacity of about [34,000 gallons], but two years later we could scale up to [14.5 million gallons], and in another two years we could reach [145 million gallons] per year. We could produce a significant amount of fuel within this decade,” predicted Steiner.

Early on, the fuel will be primarily distributed at Porsche-related events, like international races and track days held at the Experience Centers it operates around the world. Steiner also brought up the possibility of sending every new gasoline-powered model the firm manufactures off the production line with a full tank of synthetic fuel.

What if, in 2045, you want to restore a 2016 Panamera powered by the mighty 4.0-liter V-8 diesel? Creating synthetic diesel using a similar process is possible, too, but Porsche is allocating its resources to replacing gasoline because it’s what powers the vast majority of the cars it has built (and raced) since the brand’s earliest days of production.

Porsche doesn’t miss an opportunity to point out that 70 percent of the cars it has built are still on the road. With synthetic fuel as a safeguard against the changes to come, it wants to ensure they stay there.

The post Porsche shifts its synthetic fuel project into high gear appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In a hotly contested race in which $21 million was spent on messaging, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that requires car manufacturers to allow do-it-yourselfers and independent mechanics access to vehicle data for repairs.

“The people have spoken—by a huge margin—in favor of immediately updating right to repair so it applies to today’s high-tech cars and trucks,” Tommy Hickey, the director of the Yes on 1 coalition, says in a video message to supporters.

Question 1 (deciphered by Rob Siegel in this article) passed by a 3-to-1 margin. Although a 2012 “Right to Repair” law required sharing mechanical data, it didn’t cover wirelessly transmitted information. The new measure forces carmakers to share telematics, driving, and diagnostics data typically sent directly to a remote server.

The requirement is set to take effect in model year 2022.

“Tuesday’s victory shows that people overwhelmingly support fair repair,” iFixit’s Kevin Purdy writes. “And they want people they trust to fix the things they own.”

The Coalition for Safe and Secure Data, which opposed Question 1, argued that the new law comes with an increasing risk for car owners.

“As we have said from the beginning, the right to repair and the ability of local repair shops to access vehicle repair information are already enshrined in Massachusetts law,” the group says in a statement shared on Boston.com. “Today’s vote will do nothing to enhance that right—it will only grant real time, two-way access to your vehicle and increase risk. At no point did the Yes side provide any credible arguments as to why national auto parts chains need this information to service your vehicles.”

Hickey, on the other hand, says that contention sounds familiar.

“The automakers and their army of lobbyists will make noise and make up stories, saying, ‘It can’t be done,’ just like they did during the campaign. But remember, they said the exact same thing about implementing the first right to repair in 2012.”

The post Massachusetts overwhelmingly passes Right to Repair law appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A somewhat confusing automotive question is on the ballot in my home state of Massachusetts. It’s Question 1, the “Right to Repair Law, Vehicle Access Data Requirement Initiative (2020).” One side is arguing that it’s simply plugging a loophole in an existing “Right to Repair” law to include telematic (wireless) data, while the other side claims it’s an irresponsible data grab that jeopardizes personal safety. Which is it?

To both sides, and to the consumer, it’s ultimately about money, but the money comes wrapped in other issues. The term “Right to Repair” (sometimes abbreviated as “R2R”) is both general and specific. In a broad sense, it refers to a number of consumer rights initiatives where owners of goods—from automobiles to farm machinery to electronics—push for the right to take these products somewhere other than the dealer to be fixed at a reasonable cost, and that’s where vehicle manufacturers (VMs) push back, touting trademark issues and trade secret concerns. As cars have gotten more and more complex, these battles generally aren’t over nuts and bolts—they’re over hardware, software, access to data, and the money that that brings. No VM is asserting you don’t have the right to change a flat tire or replace a wiper blade yourself.

To understand the confusion over the 2020 R2R ballot question, it’s necessary to understand why cars have onboard diagnostics, what the Massachusetts 2012 R2R ballot question was, why it was then voluntarily adopted nationally by the VMs, and what is meant by “telematic data.”

A Brief History of OBD-II

Beginning in the mid-1970s, in order to comply with the increasingly stringent standards of the Clean Air Act, engine management systems in cars became more complex. By the end of the 1980s, nearly all cars had electronic fuel injection, an oxygen sensor, and an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) to manage it all. California, and then the feds, soon mandated that VMs include On Board Diagnostics (OBD) that monitored the health of emissions-related systems and reported malfunctions to the driver. These early OBD systems typically had a “blinky light” that was actuated by an arcane series of steps such as clicking the key to ignition, mashing the gas pedal three times, and then counting the number of flashes. In addition to OBD, VMs began including a connector into which a dealer-only computer could be plugged for their own diagnostic and repair purposes.

As part of the 1990 Gore-Waxman amendment to the Clean Air Act, Congress required that all auto VMs include a standardized 16-pin OBD-II diagnostic port presenting standardized emissions-related digital messages that any repair shop or individual could access and get information on the cause of an emissions-related failure. We may all rail against the “Check Engine Light” (CEL) when it comes on, but the fact that we can buy a $30 OBD-II code reader, plug it in, and read, for example, that we have a misfire in cylinder #2, and run out and buy a stick coil and replace it ourselves (or have the corner garage do this) is a triumph of “right to repair,” even though at that time it wasn’t spelled with two capital Rs.

After 1996, with the industry-wide incorporation of OBD-II, the dealer-only proprietary connectors generally went away, and both the standard OBD-II messages as well as proprietary marque-specific messages were transmitted over the 16-pin connector (the proprietary messages are presented on one of the connector’s vendor-optional pins). But in order to read the proprietary messages, you needed the dealer-only diagnostic computer. That is, the Clean Air Act mandated that you have the right to repair emissions-related systems, but it didn’t mandate that the manufacturer share all diagnostic data, only emissions-related diagnostic data. This distinction continues to this day: If you buy an inexpensive OBD-II code reader, it will only read the standardized emissions-related messages, but if you buy something model-specific that calls itself a “scan tool,” it should read at least some of the model-specific messages. Note that, as cars have gotten more complex, the number of control modules in each car has increased dramatically. There may be modules for heating and A/C, lighting, and transmission control, and an OBD-II code reader may not read fault codes from any of them, as they’re not emissions-related.

The 2012 Right to Repair Law and 2014 MOU

In 2012, Massachusetts put a “Right to Repair” question on the ballot that mandated that VMs provide the means to access all diagnostic data, not just the standard OBD-II emissions-related data, by 2015. It passed overwhelmingly, with 86 percent voting for the initiative. The ballot question was then superseded by a Massachusetts state law. Faced with the possibility of dealing with similar initiatives in other states, in 2014 the VMs, represented by trade organizations such as the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association for Global Automakers, compromised with Massachusetts and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), agreeing that by 2018 it would meet the requirements and provide the means for accessing diagnostic data not just in Massachusetts but in all 50 states. In theory, this means that independent repair shops have the means to access the fault codes and other diagnostic information from all control modules, not just the emissions-related codes.

It’s instructive to actually read the MOU. It seems to offer five avenues for diagnostic data sharing. The first describes sharing information with scan tool manufacturers:

“Each manufacturer shall provide diagnostic repair information to each aftermarket scan tool company and each third party service information provider with whom the manufacturer has appropriate licensing, contractual or confidentiality agreements for the sole purpose of building aftermarket diagnostic tools and third party service information publications and systems.”

As a do-it-yourselfer, I wondered: If VMs have been required since the MOU went into effect to provide the ability to decode the previously-proprietary diagnostic information, where are the new generation of affordable scan tools that allow folks like me to access this newly-available diagnostic info on my BMW? The answer appears to be that making the diagnostic information available and deciding that there’s a market for a DIY marque-specific scan tool that does much more than an OBD-II code reader are two different things.

In addition, the MOI says that, by 2018, VMs must make diagnostics available via one of the following three methods:

1. A personal computer and a non-proprietary vehicle interface device that complies with the Society of Automotive Engineers SAE J2534 [that’s the 16-pin OBD-II connector]
2. An on-board diagnostic and repair information system integrated and entirely self-contained within the vehicle such as a service information system integrated into an onboard display.
3. A system that provides direct access to on-board diagnostic and repair information through a non-proprietary vehicle interface such as Ethernet, Universal Serial Bus or Digital Versatile Disc.

The fifth diagnostic data sharing avenue is subscription-based technical updates:

A manufacturer of motor vehicles sold in the United States shall make available for purchase … the same diagnostic and repair information, including repair technical updates, that such manufacturer makes available to its dealers through the manufacturer’s internet-based diagnostic and repair information system or other electronically accessible manufacturer’s repair information system. All content in any such manufacturer’s repair information system shall be made available to owners and to independent repair facilities in the same form and manner and to the same extent as is made available to dealers utilizing such diagnostic and repair information system. Each manufacturer shall provide access to such manufacturer’s diagnostic and repair information system for purchase by owners and independent repair facilities on a daily, monthly, and yearly subscription basis and upon fair and reasonable terms.

I list all five of these because they make it very clear that the intent of the 2012 law and the 2015 MOU is to allow independent repair shops (and, to some extent, individuals) the same diagnostic capability as the VM.

Exempted from that agreement, however, were several things. One was “diagnostic service and repair information necessary to reset an immobilizer system or security-related electronic modules.” This was to address concerns that providing wider access to this information could increase vehicle theft.

But the other major exemption in the 2015 MOU, one which the VMs reportedly lobbied hard for, is telematic data. “Telematics,” at its most basic, is a vehicle’s ability to transmit data to a remote computer where it is stored and analyzed. Telematics really began with fleet management, where a trucking company could outfit its vehicles with GPS, have those locations sent back to a central server via a cellular link, and thus keep track of where they all were. But with personal vehicles, it had its start when, nearly 25 years ago, General Motors introduced its OnStar system that detected an airbag deployment and alerted first responders to come to the accident scene. Other subscription-based systems followed, generally marketed around security, safety, and rapid response in the event of accident or need for roadside assistance.

The exact language of the telematic exception in the 2015 MOI is as follows, with bold added for emphasis:

“With the exception of telematic diagnostic and repair information that is provided to dealers, necessary to diagnose and repair a customer’s vehicle and not otherwise available to an independent repair facility… nothing in this chapter shall apply to telematics services or any other remote or information service, diagnostic or otherwise, delivered to or derived from a motor vehicle by mobile communications… For the purposes of this chapter, telematics services shall include, but not be limited to, automatic airbag deployment and crash notification, remote diagnostics, navigation, stolen vehicle location, remote door unlock, transmitting emergency and vehicle location information to public safety answering points and any other service integrating vehicle location technology and wireless communications.”

And that brings us to…

The 2020 Right to Repair Ballot Question

Although it’s estimated that 90 percent of new vehicles sold have some sort of telematics, it’s specifically excluded from the 2012 R2R Law and 2015 MOI, so currently these telematic data streams are accessible only by the vehicle manufacturer and their dealers. The stated intent of the 2020 Right to Repair ballot question is to close this telematic loophole—to do what OBD-II did for emissions-related diagnostics and what the 2012 Right to Repair Law attempted to do for all vehicle diagnostics and make the telematic data available to you or to an independent repair shop. The ballot question is pretty straightforward. It reads:

This proposed law would require that motor vehicle owners and independent repair facilities be provided with expanded access to mechanical data related to vehicle maintenance and repair.

“Starting with model year 2022, the proposed law would require manufacturers of motor vehicles sold in Massachusetts to equip any such vehicles that use telematics systems—systems that collect and wirelessly transmit mechanical data to a remote server—with a standardized open access data platform. Owners of motor vehicles with telematics systems would get access to mechanical data through a mobile device application. With vehicle owner authorization, independent repair facilities (those not affiliated with a manufacturer) and independent dealerships would be able to retrieve mechanical data from, and send commands to, the vehicle for repair, maintenance, and diagnostic testing.

“Under the proposed law, manufacturers would not be allowed to require authorization before owners or repair facilities could access mechanical data stored in a motor vehicle’s onboard diagnostic system, except through an authorization process standardized across all makes and models and administered by an entity unaffiliated with the manufacturer.

Predictably, those in favor of the ballot question include a coalition of independent repair shops and auto parts chains. Domestic and foreign auto VMs are vociferously against it.

So who’s right?

In my opinion, the “Yes on 1” side is slightly misrepresenting their position, but the “No on 1” side is outright lying about theirs. Here’s why:

The ballot question says “mechanical data” not once, but five times, and that access requires the owner’s permission. The question does not include access to personal data, such as location. This is crucial, because the “No on 1” organizers are blatantly fear-mongering the question as a personal security issue. Their political organization, named “The Coalition For Safe And Secure Data” has created a series of creepy sensational ads. One shows a young woman, stalked while walking alone to her car in a parking garage, with the breathy voiceover: “If Question 1 passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the most personal data stored in your vehicle. Domestic violence advocates say that a sexual predator could use the data to stalk their victims, pinpoint exactly where you are, whether you are alone, even take control of your vehicle. Vote no on 1. Keep your data safe.” I’m sorry, but what a lying load of malarkey. Upon examination, the supposed “no” endorsement by a domestic violence group isn’t even for the Massachusetts ballot question; it’s from an unrelated initiative in California.

I’ll agree, though, that the “No on 1” folks does have a point when they say, “We already voted on Right to Repair, you already have it, and independent repair shops already have what they need,” at least as it applies to diagnostic data that’s available through the OBD-II port and via other means. However, they lose all credibility with me with the scare tactics and with the pretense that it’s about “safe and secure data” instead of maintaining the status quo of telematic data being available only to the VMs whose money is behind “No on 1.” I’d have more respect for them if they just told the truth and said, “Look, we’ve spent millions on these diagnostics; it’s not fair to ask us to just give them away.”

Looking at the “Yes on 1” side’s argument, the fact sheet on massrighttorepair.org reads: “More than 90 percent of new cars transmit real-time repair information wirelessly, and independent repair shops will soon have limited or no access. Vehicle manufacturers are increasingly restricting access to car information. This means car owners are steered toward more expensive dealer repair options. It’s your car—shouldn’t it be your right to access the information you need to repair it without having to pay high prices at the dealer? Massachusetts voters voted 86 percent in 2012 to require car companies to make available repair information and diagnostics. But now big auto is using the next generation of wireless technology to get around the law and shut out independent repair shops. That’s not what we voted for. It’s your car, you paid for it. You should get it fixed where you want.” In my opinion, although it’s a bit hyped-up from a marketing standpoint, this is all valid, and the ads from the “Yes on 1” side are largely truthful.

There is, however, a “but.” Recall that, although the 2015 MOI excluded telematic data, it included an exception for diagnostic telematic data. For example, if a car began hesitating, ran worse and worse, and finally died, and if real-time telematic diagnostic information analogous to an automotive EKG of the failure in progress (more than simply stored fault codes) was sent off the car to a dealership, the VM is supposed to have also made that information available through a plug-in connection to the data port. So it begs the question: What, exactly, is the telematic “mechanical data” that independents feel they need access to? I discovered the answer, but it’s a bit arcane.

The #2 donor to the “Right to Repair Committee” is the Auto Care Association, an industry trade group representing independent repair shops and manufacturers of parts and tools. In 2013, ACA and others formed the Telematics Task Force (TTF). If you dig online, you can find the TTF’s papers and presentations. Note that the Task Force, being formed by trade groups representing independents, is unabashedly pro-independent, with a mission statement that vows, “To empower vehicle owners to direct the services of their vehicles to locations of their choice.” Their papers, however, are pretty well thought-out. One is a December 2014 white paper that discusses standards and usage scenarios for the following different kinds of telematic data:

• Driver personal data (including name and current vehicle location)
• Driving behavior data such as acceleration, steering, and braking
• Forensic (accident-related) information
• Annual motor vehicle inspection data
• Diagnostic data
• VM proprietary information such as versions of software in the different control modules
• Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) data (GPS, radar, sonar, yaw, pitch, accelerometer, etc.)
• In-vehicle infotainment data

The white paper includes a reference to a standardized telematic vehicle data format and a “common vehicle gateway” to allow access to the data. Additional detail on this is contained in a 2015 Telematics Task Force presentation. The paper also discusses what it refers to as vehicle “prognostics”—the ability to analyze data from multiple cars, identify trends, look at data from a particular car, and predict a failure before it happens.

The conclusion of the white paper is very telling:

The “if the dealer gets it, we should get it” rule of thumb has served the industry well, and there is no reason it cannot be continued into the telematics age. In fact, for the most part, the rule does not have to change at all, except for the addition of two new concepts.

1. There [should be] no fundamental difference between the diagnostics the VMs have agreed to provide, hooking a scan tool to a vehicle connector, and remote diagnostics, hooking up to a vehicle via radio signal, whether that signal travels 3 feet or 3000 miles.
2. If the dealer has VM access to prognostics through telematics, aftermarket suppliers need to have access to the same information so that it can be provided to aftermarket repair facilities.

… The information the aftermarket needs is the same as what VMs have already agreed to provide through a wired connection, with one exception.

Telematics brings with it prognostics, a kind of diagnostic process based on vehicle data that can only be gathered using telematics. The MOU that was signed one year ago states: “With the exception of telematics, diagnostic and repair information that is provided to dealers, necessary to diagnose and repair a customer’s vehicle, and not otherwise available to an independent repair facility via the tools specified in… above, nothing in this agreement shall apply to telematics services or any other remote or information service.” We submit that prognostic information derived from telematics is diagnostic data not provided through the vehicle diagnostic connector. In the final analysis, we find that the definition of the telematics data we need includes any data provided directly or indirectly to a car owner or a new car dealer through telematics systems for the purpose of performing maintenance and repair on vehicles. This includes any diagnostic, prognostic, or maintenance related information generated by a telematics transaction.

It is our desire to look for productive ways to work with VMs to continue to raise the level of service offered to our mutual customers. We feel that telematics is the natural evolution of this process. In addition to augmented diagnostic abilities, we also recognize that prognostic, diagnostic and maintenance warning capabilities built into these vehicles should be such that vehicle owners can decide who will receive this data and ultimately who will service their vehicles.” [I bolded the type for emphasis.]

When presented this way, it’s not at all surprising that the VMs offered their “we’ll give you wired diagnostic data through the OBD-II port, but telematics are off the table” compromise in 2015, and that independents apparently immediately began plotting another run at the issue. It looks to me like members of the Telematics Task Force simplified their argument by reducing that list of data types into just “mechanical data” and “personal data,” said they’re only addressing “mechanical data” to head off privacy concerns, removed the esoteric references to “prognostics” as the reason for needing access to telematic data, replaced it with a broader “extend R2R to include wireless data” argument, sprinkled it with a dash of “it’s your data, you should decide who gets it” language, and six years later, their white paper popped out as the 2020 R2R ballot question.

I intend to vote “yes” on Question 1. However, I’ll admit that I think the “mechanical data” thing is a bit of a red herring. I think that this has less to do with diagnostics and repair (e.g., vehicle has already broken) and instead has everything to do with creating an opportunity to market for maintenance. What independents are most concerned about is that there’s currently a closed-loop electronic relationship between the vehicle owner and the dealer/VM, and it’s only going to get worse. The car’s mileage and service needs are being monitored by its embedded software and can be transmitted telematically to the dealer/VM. If an oil change is due, or the tires are nearing the end of their projected service life, or the check engine light comes on, the dealer can get that information, call, email, or text the owner to schedule a repair appointment, or that can be done right on the screen in the car’s console. In contrast, an independent shop currently has no way to break into this loop, and those folks desperately want it. They want you to schedule an appointment with them instead of the dealer, if you so choose.

I’ll admit that I cringe at the possibility of a Minority Report-style future—“Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the Gap. How did those assorted new tank tops work out for you?”—where every independent repair shop can beam targeted marketing pablum into my car. But, in fairness, the dealer/VM can essentially do this now, and the ballot question says that access would require your authorization.

Regarding the actual architecture of the proposed “remote server with a standardized open access data platform,” even some of those who support the R2R initiative have reasonable questions about the design and timeframe. James C. Owens, the deputy administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), weighed in on the matter in a letter to the Massachusetts legislature. He called the initiative’s data access platform requirements “vague,” and expressed concern that, given the initiative’s 2022 target, developing a system that keeps vehicle control isolated from diagnostics and fully testing and debugging it by then might not be possible. Personally, I don’t consider this a showstopper. I look at how it played out in 2012, where a ballot question turned into a Massachusetts state law, which turned into a compromise with the VMs that carried a delay of several years in implementation. The ballot question, if it passes, will likely be a similar starting point for a negotiation with the VM industry.

I think that the 2020 “Right to Repair” Massachusetts ballot question is pretty much what it claims to be in terms of being an extension of the 2012 R2R law to include telematic data. The wiggle room in “pretty much” is that the access to telematic data is likely as much an opportunity to market repair services to you as it is an actual conduit for repair-related information. Still, in an environment where boundaries are constantly being drawn over data ownership, saying that this is your data and not the dealer/VM’s and that you have the right to determine who has access to it is a good thing.

***

Rob Siegel has been writing a column (The Hack Mechanic) for BMW CCA Roundel magazine for 34 years and is the author of seven automotive books. His new book, The Lotus Chronicles: One man’s sordid tale of passion and madness resurrecting a 40-year-dead Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special, is now available on Amazon (as are his other books), or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, robsiegel.com.

The post Deciphering Massachusetts’ “Right to Repair” ballot question appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Even as he sat down to sign the most sweeping environmental protection law in the nation’s history, Richard Nixon couldn’t help taking a swipe at one of his enemies. Notably absent from the signing ceremony for the landmark 1970 Clean Air Act was Edmund Muskie, the Maine Democrat who had steered “that Muskie bill” through the Senate and who was expected to run for president against Nixon in 1972. Muskie said he hadn’t been told the bill would be signed that day.

Though the political intrigues were soon forgotten, the revisions to Title 42, Chapter 85 of the United States Code are still making an impact 50 years later. The law Nixon signed on December 31, 1970, forever changed the vehicles that Americans bought and drove, and it continues to do so today. It gave the newly created Environmental Protection Agency the regulatory bludgeon it needed to make cleaner air actually happen. And where it came to automobiles, the EPA effectively handed that bludgeon to a small group of engineers and regulators in the smoggy suburbs of Los Angeles. If you own any car built and certified for sale in the United States after 1975, it has their fingerprints all over it. “I was kind of astonished at the power that I had,” recalls Steve Albu, who spent 31 years helping set emissions standards for the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a state regulatory body that ended up having an enormous role in setting the course of the nation’s auto emissions laws. “I didn’t really understand what I was getting into.”

The “goop” in the air

The U.S. Weather Bureau credited the city of Indianapolis with popularizing the word smog, a contraction of the words smoke and fog, when it adopted the term in 1926 as an official weather condition. However, it was already in wide use in cities ranging from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama. Civic leaders in New York City worried about the health of the smog-shrouded trees in Central Park, while enterprising haberdashers in St. Louis marketed smog-proof hats. In 1929, The Pittsburgh Press made front-page hay for months with a campaign to expose gross polluters in the city. But soon the Great Depression set in, and there were greater predicaments to deal with in a world that was also lurching toward war.

Out west in Los Angeles, a city hemmed in by mountains that prevent winds from blowing away pollutants, the first “smog day” was in summer 1943, when visibility dropped to three blocks and hospital emergency rooms filled with people suffering burning eyes and lungs. The government called it a “gas attack” and blamed it on a war plant that made butadiene for the production of synthetic rubber. The plant was shut, briefly, but the gray haze endured, an ominous harbinger of the days and years that lay ahead for the City of Angels.

In nearby Pasadena, at the California Institute of Technology, a Dutch-born biochemistry professor named Arie Haagen-Smit had no interest in smog. He was trying to determine why different vegetables tasted the way they did by heating them and collecting the vapors in condensers for chemical analysis. But one day in 1949 when, as he said, “the smog was thick enough to touch even a chemist’s senses,” he decided to run a couple hundred cubic feet of outside air through the process. Observing the vial of smelly brown water that resulted, Haagen-Smit decided that he wanted to know more about what he called “the goop in the air.”

Haagen-Smit knew that gasoline is a liquid chemical that is distilled from petroleum and made up largely of hydrogen and carbon joined in big molecules, hence gasoline’s scientific nickname, “hydrocarbon.” A car engine is basically a chemistry set in which the hydrocarbons in the fuel get mixed with air, which is primarily nitrogen and oxygen, and are then heated by a spark. With oxygen acting as the little homewrecker, the carbon in the fuel violently splits away from the hydrogen in favor of some new shotgun marriages. Carbon and oxygen go off together as carbon dioxide and the deadlier carbon monoxide. And nitrogen and oxygen, which live happily separate in the atmosphere, get forced together by the intense heat and pressure of the cylinder into a mutant marriage called oxides of nitrogen.

Also exiting the tailpipe is a certain amount of raw fuel that a fast-moving engine doesn’t have time to combust. Haagen-Smit concluded that the goop was the byproduct of the unburned fuel from cars (as well as refineries) mixing with oxides of nitrogen and being roasted together in the sun into a thick layer of ground-level ozone. Or smog. The discovery earned Haagen-Smit the dubious title of “The Father of Smog” and elicited little response at first. But the public’s distaste for choking air eventually swelled, as did its determination to vote in leaders willing to do something about it.

Government: Go invent your way out

The perfect storm of the 1960s, characterized by men on the moon and marchers in the streets, produced a burgeoning environmental movement. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 and superheated the nation’s growing concern about its environment. At the time of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, air and water pollution ranked high on the list of voter issues. What good was moonshot technology if it couldn’t help fix the problems on Earth? Nixon devoted a significant portion of his 1970 State of the Union to the subject, singling out the automobile as “our worst polluter of the air.”

“We shall intensify our research,” he went on, “set increasingly strict standards, and strengthen enforcement procedures—and we shall do it now.” And though it sounds strange in this era of strangled government, that’s exactly what happened. The Muskie Bill was a new kind of regulation, a strategy to force the auto industry to invent its way out of the problem of smog.

The government “saw the necessity to mandate technology that nobody knew how to do at the time,” says John German, a long-serving former EPA administrator who in retirement helped uncover the Volkswagen diesel scandal. “Car companies are risk-averse environments. They are afraid to put things into production quickly so as to limit the damage when it goes wrong. Things like catalytic converters were black magic. Most people didn’t really know how they worked.”

In the 1970 Clean Air Act, federal and state regulatory agencies could set air-quality targets that were binding. And vehicles were treated differently in the law than other polluters, notes Tom Cackette, who helped write some of the most significant auto emissions regulations during a long career at CARB. While stationary polluters such as powerplants were allowed to use off-the-shelf technology to scrub their stacks, automakers were told that if the technology didn’t exist to meet the standards, then they should go out and invent it.

“If you read Title II of the Clean Air Act,” says Cackette, “it tells the EPA to set the standards based on the best technology given lead time and cost considerations. It basically says these are technology-forcing regulations.”

California’s role in the shaping of the modern car can’t be understated. The Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District, established in 1947, was the first regulatory body of its kind anywhere in the nation. In 1965, state air-quality researchers were the first to start creating a system of tests to precisely measure a car’s tail-pipe emissions. That fall, they deployed seven vehicles, ranging from a 1957 Ford to a 1966 Chevy II, on a 12-mile loop (eventually shortened to 7.5 miles) around the agency’s lab, then located in downtown Los Angeles.

The goal was to mimic a normal commute. Using precise acceleration, idling, and cruise traces from five different drivers, the team developed the first composite drive cycles that could be taken inside and duplicated on dynamometers, where exhaust gases could be better captured and measured. Those first drive cycles, with names like “LA4” and “XC-15,” formed the basis for the vehicle emissions tests still used today.

By 1966, California was ready to institute a statewide vehicle emissions standard for new cars, the first such measure in the nation. It required pressurized crankcase ventilators, or the plumbing of crankcase fumes thick with hydrocarbons into the intake manifold rather than out to the atmosphere. There was no mechanism to stop California from doing this; at the time, overriding federal emissions legislation simply didn’t exist. That didn’t come until the Air Quality Act in 1967, a successor to federal laws passed in 1955 and 1964 but a still largely toothless opening salvo in the country’s coming war on smog.

In 1970, everything changed. The newly formed EPA was handed the power to set binding standards, and it deferred largely to California on vehicle emissions because the state already was leading the nation in that area. Washington was also yielding to a petition from California’s then governor, Ronald Reagan, to allow California to retain its authority to set its own emissions standards owing to its unique topography and climate conditions. The so-called “California waiver” was born, and it remains in the books (and controversial) today.

The industry’s first stumbling steps are well-known to—and well despised by—car collectors. The first set of standards attacked smog head-on, basically mandating that automakers cut hydrocarbon and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions by more than 50 percent by 1975. The muscle car era died when automakers retarded the ignition to lower NOx production and retuned the carburetors to be less rich, and the carburetors grew dashpots and other barnacles to prevent sudden gusts of unburned fuel when the throttle snapped closed.

Compression ratios plummeted so temperatures and pressures inside the cylinder would be less severe and produce less NOx. Exhaust-gas recirculation (EGR), in which some exhaust gas was returned to the intake to further lower temperatures, became a thing. Because the engines now had to pass emissions tests, they were sealed up against shadetree tinkering, their carburetor adjusting screws either stripped off or hidden. Backyard speed tuners began to feel the first squeeze of the law, and their magazines railed against the new restrictions.

“Surely the government has laid on an imposing dose of garbled, D.C.-style, civil-service, fat-brain rules, directives, amendments, bulletins, acts, advisories and sub-paragraphs,” opined Car and Driver in 1972. “Much of it is unvarnished, self-defeating nonsense.” And indeed, the first emissions controls were hasty and improvised. Immediately there were problems. New cars were failing to meet the standards right off the assembly line. Government testing in the early ’70s showed that one in four new vehicles were too dirty to meet the new standards, and the failure rate increased as the miles rolled up. The industry protested that catalytic converters wouldn’t be ready by 1975 and demanded extensions. Some companies tried to tune their engines with lean-burn strategies that would save them the cost of fitting up catalysts, or that would rely on the catalysts less, and new cars began stalling out practically in front of the dealerships.

Longtime Car and Driver editor Patrick Bedard remembers visiting Detroit for a car launch around 1974 when the new Plymouth he was driving “gave a cough, a gasp, and died,” whereupon he was rear-ended. “It was one of those coffin-nosed AMC Ambassadors with a kind of projection coming out of the bumper, and WHAM! My neck hurt for six weeks after that.”

Albu, the California regulator, joined Chrysler in 1969, and by 1971, he was working in the company’s Los Angeles outpost trying to figure out why brand-new cars were failing California’s smog checks. “Calibrations were done [in Michigan] at the proving grounds,” he says. “They just took the federal calibrations and dumped more EGR into them and more retarded timing and leaned out the carburetors to try to get them to pass. Honestly, they drove like crap.”

The problem with technology-forcing regulations, says Paul Baltusis, an emissions compliance consultant who spent more than 30 years at Ford and 18 of them as the company’s onboard diagnostics technical leader, is that they force automakers to pull technology out of the oven before it’s fully baked. “CARB asks manufacturers to do something that has not been proven to be technically feasible, but you are on a timetable to put it in production and take the risk if it fails,” he says.

Even so, California and the EPA held firm on their timelines, and the first catalytic converters sprouted in vehicle exhaust pipes in 1975. The canister-like devices, still in use today in more sophisticated form, are filled with long, mesh screens composed of a type of metal that breaks apart some of the weird marriages formed by combustion. In the early “two-way” catalysts, carbon monoxide became more benign carbon dioxide, and hydrocarbons become carbon dioxide and water. Later three-way catalysts that arrived in the early 1980s also split up smog-forming NOx into harmless nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

Some car companies rode out the regulatory earthquake better than others. “Around 1977, when NOx standards tightened in California, the cars got really bad, and I complained bitterly about it,” says Albu, then still at Chrysler. The Los Angeles office pushed the engineers back in Michigan for improved calibrations, but “one guy said in exasperation, ‘California—land of fruits and nuts, who cares?’” Eventually Albu received permission to create unique calibrations for California after renting some Ford and GM vehicles and demonstrating how much better Chrysler’s competitors were at meeting the new regulations. “I drove the GM cars, and it was night and day. GM was involved extensively in inventing the catalytic converter, and they were doing was using it to its maximum extent with their calibrations right out of the gate. Ford and especially Chrysler had some catching up to do.”

The catalytic converter is a highly effective pollution-control device, but it’s sensitive to overheating without the exact fuel metering of fuel injection or the sophisticated computer controls we have today. “Precise air-fuel control is so important,” says former EPA administrator German. “Imagine these poor engineers trying to do this in the mid-’70s. They had huge computer rooms filled with tape machines running day and night to analyze this stuff.”

CARB’s Cackette recalls the struggles of the automakers. “I remember one unnamed company,” he says. “The first time one of their cars passed, my staff went out and bought them a cake to celebrate, because it was almost a known that they were going to fail.”

Car and Driver’s Bedard, whose first job was also at Chrysler and also in its emissions lab, was a young speed-crazed engineer haplessly standing for hours next to cars being tested on dynos, watching “the ink-slinger recorder zigzagging across paper.” After he moved over to auto journalism, he recalls the sinking feeling as regulations in the 1970s drained the fun out of cars. “I remember those times vividly,” he says. “There was real gloom around the magazine at what was happening to cars and the whole car-enthusiast world.”

The mountains begin to reappear

But the measures were working, especially in California where the air quality was the worst and the regulations were the toughest. Tailpipe emissions of hydrocarbons and NOx, the two main pollutants contributing to smog, had plummeted from an average of 14 grams per mile in 1965-model cars to 3 grams per mile by 1975. By 1981, as fuel injection, three-way catalytic converters, oxygen sensors, and early computers started coming online, the figure had dropped to 1.5 grams per mile. The mountains were slowly reappearing from the goop.

By then, Albu had taken a job working for CARB, its rulemaking board a group of 14 citizens appointed by the governor from across the state’s legal, political, and professional spectrum. The board took data generated by its staff of roughly 30 laboratory researchers and then set the standards for the state—and ultimately the nation, as California’s rules would typically be adopted by the EPA three to four years later. Albu says the EPA deferred to California because the Golden State was pushing hardest for cleaner cars and had built a solid team of engineers and scientists at a new laboratory in the suburb of El Monte, about 20 minutes east of downtown Los Angeles.

“I worked with Caltech graduates, Stanford graduates, people from back east,” he says. “From my Chrysler days, I knew the guys at Carter and Holley fuel systems and all the reps from the catalyst suppliers like Corning, Engelhard, and Johnson Matthey. They showed us their most advanced stuff because they were interested in selling their new technologies.”

Albu and his colleagues were working on a host of programs in the 1980s to further reduce smog, including ratcheting down tailpipe hydrocarbons and NOx standards, addressing diesel, motorcycle, and off-highway emissions from farm equipment and other sources, and introducing cleaner-burning gasoline. As new technologies arrived, such as three-way catalysts in 1980 and widespread electronic fuel injection soon after, emissions benefited. Even so, new cars still emitted twice as much hydrocarbons and NOx as they do today.

The engineers in El Monte decided in 1986 to build a test car themselves with the most sophisticated prototype pollution controls they could get their hands on from the suppliers. “I chose a Buick LeSabre with a V-6, and we basically built it up to see what level of emissions we could achieve and still have good drivability and fuel economy,” Albu says. “Having worked at a car company, I was really pedantic about drivability. I didn’t want the cars to be stumbling, surging, any of that stuff. I felt if we couldn’t set a standard without any of that, then I didn’t want to do the standard.”

To prove the Buick was commercially salable, Albu loaned it to the manufacturer reps to drive it on the streets after soaking the car in a cold storage room at the lab to reset it so that the starting and running conditions were always the same. The researchers took their results to CARB, and the real-world data from an actual running prototype was powerful enough to override automaker complaints that it couldn’t be done. “We used that approach to drive the standards down for a decade,” Albu says.

Relations with the automakers waxed and waned. “It went through periods,” recalls Cackette. “It depended on how strong the environmental movement was in relation to the economy, and who was running the car companies.” When Robert Stempel joined the GM board in 1986 and became the company’s CEO in 1990, it represented a changing of the guard. “He was a catalyst engineer,” says Cackette, “so you started to have people who grew up with emissions controls rather than seeing it as this thing forced on them.”

Albu adds that no progress would have happened without cooperation in the sometimes-daily meetings between the factory reps and the regulators. “Over time, we developed a rapport with the industry, and that’s what I credit most with finally getting to the goal. We treated them with respect, we listened to them, we didn’t just act like know-it-all bureaucrats.”

The next crusade: Self-doctoring cars

A problem was looming, however: To meet the ever-tightening standards, cars were becoming so complex that technicians couldn’t diagnose and repair them. In the early days of regulation, a car’s emissions performance was often down to machining tolerances on carburetor shafts, pressure valves, and ignition parts, which tended to have some variability in mass production. That was hard enough to diagnose. With the arrival of three-way catalysts and the attending closed-loop feedback controls run by black boxes, diagnosis and repair were becoming almost impossible.

Albu says he suggested to his superiors that the cars should come with some sort of onboard system that could self-diagnose problems with the emissions system, and a check-engine light on the dash to tell the driver when to take the car in for repair. A car that could doctor its own diseases seemed like a fairy tale in the early 1980s, and making it a reality seemed to have an almost limitless number of zeros after the dollar sign. “The industry hated that, hated it to death,” says Albu. “It was the worst fight of our lives.”

After the frontal attack on smog with catalytic converters, onboard diagnostics became the second great crusade to be undertaken by air-quality regulators. The technical hurdles were enormous. An onboard monitoring computer had to know the health of the oxygen sensors, the exhaust-gas recirculation system, the fuel-delivery system, the powertrain-control module, and any other systems involved in tailpipe exhaust or evaporative emissions—and to be able to relay any fault with those components to a technician, initially through dash lights flashing in code, later by a standardized data port. Because any fuel escaping through evaporation was the same as hydrocarbons coming out of the tailpipe, the car had to be able to pressurize its own fuel system with air and measure any leak-down. A leak anywhere in the system of just a few thousandths of an inch could cause the check-engine light to come on.

“In 1988 and 1989,” says Baltusis, the former Ford OBD leader, “no one really knew how to monitor a catalytic converter or how to do misfire detection. Manufacturers would try different concepts using cobbled hardware and prototype software to show CARB the progress they were making” toward meeting the deadlines, especially for the tougher OBD-II upgrade that followed in the mid-1990s—which, among other things, standardized the fault codes across the industry, as well as the data port. “It was like a big science experiment.”

And the industry would have to ensure the system worked much longer. Previously, automakers had only been required to ensure that emissions measured during certification would remain within the required standards for a statutory limit of 120,000 miles. Perhaps most galling about the proposed onboard diagnostic system was that it had to work “for the life of the vehicle.” That wording in the regulation was a backdoor way for the regulators to ensure that, without actually changing the law, cars would be designed to drive cleaner for longer. “They hollered like crazy,” recalls Albu. The automakers didn’t like the prospect of having to build cars with a check-engine light that could potentially be triggered by dozens of components at any time over the years and decades of the car’s life. “They said it’ll cost billions, that it’s not feasible,” says Albu. “But we couldn’t achieve our goal without it. It’s that simple.”

California’s initial 1988 regulation was a brief, two-page mandate that left a lot of room for automakers to proceed as they wanted. The result was a hodgepodge of systems and giant loopholes. The follow-up OBD-II regulation adopted in 1996 had a list of requirements that ran 120 pages. The industry lawyered up, and Albu found himself in a room squaring off against eight opposition attorneys. “They would ask me questions like, ‘Did you cost out the costs for a Chevy Malibu with a 350 engine? Did you cost out a Ford Fairlane with a 302? On and on for 12 hours. I almost wanted to quit.”

Eventually, says CARB’s Cackette, automakers came to the same conclusion as the regulators: Cars were becoming too complex to repair without onboard diagnostics, and the alternative was cars that failed emissions tests and massive recalls, an unhappy prospect. It did cost billions, however, and it absorbed the labor of thousands as automakers had to change everything, from the computers that ran the engines to the sensors that monitored their operation to the service tools in the dealerships.

And it’s still ongoing. “The thing about OBD is that it never ends,” says Baltusis. “CARB changes the regulations every two to three years, so you are never done. They have always underestimated the cost of OBD, both the hardware and the software development and testing cost.” A vehicle’s OBD system has thousands of lines of code that must be validated and thousands of parameters that must be calibrated and validated by engineers who take years to learn their jobs, says Baltusis. Any small error can cause a drivability issue or emissions problem that leads to an expensive recall. The onboard diagnostics regulation “is a never-ending escalation of requirements with increasing stringency,” he says. “It is causing problems to this very day as technology changes. Hybrid vehicles and diesel engine technology require constant reinterpretation of the regs for both manufacturers and CARB staff.”

As anyone who has had a check-engine light repeatedly come on because of a loose gas cap can confirm, onboard diagnostics technology did not arrive without problems. Though, says CARB’s Cackette, “I give the automakers huge compliments for what they’ve been able to do to improve the environment. I believe that they and the heavy-duty [truck] guys are the most technically capable organizations that make hardware in the world.”

There was cheating, too, especially in the early days. Cackette remembers one Ford that had a subtle switch triggered by opening the hood. The emissions controls worked when the hood was up, as it would be during a smog test, and not when it wasn’t. But as onboard diagnostics came in, the ability to cheat withered away. Into the 1990s, all of the cars that CARB and the EPA tested were passing, whether new or with miles on them, and eventually both agencies cut back on their testing to allocate resources elsewhere. The high pass rate “told us that they weren’t cheating, and that was the general belief until the VW thing came along,” says Cackette. “Nobody thought anyone would have the balls to do that.”

In 2014, tipped off by independent researchers that diesel-powered Volkswagens were running dirty, regulators in California determined that the company had installed a “cheat device,” or software that made the car’s emissions controls work harder during government tests and then slack off the rest of the time. Thus far, VW has paid more than $34 billion in fines and settlement costs. Outside of that incident, the regulators and the industry engineers, forced to work together by society’s demand for cleaner cars, have largely labored in harmony through the decades, say both regulators and retired engineers.

That is, until greenhouse-gas standards.

The CO2 war begins

The third great crusade by the emissions regulators in California takes on global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide coming out of vehicle tail-pipes. The initiative has smashed the close working relationship CARB enjoyed with the industry, and it has driven a wedge between California and its longtime partner in Washington, the EPA. When California decided it was in the greenhouse-gas-reduction business, “another load of crap came down on us,” says Albu. “The industry blew up. People stopped returning our calls.”

Reducing carbon dioxide is the same as increasing fuel economy, and under our screwy system, corporate average fuel-economy standards are the purview of yet another federal agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The matter seemed settled in 2012 when the industry, California, and the Obama administration agreed on a 54.5-mpg standard by 2025. But that agreement unraveled under the succeeding Trump administration, which is trying to ease the regulatory burden for automakers. California says it’s standing by the original deal—with the concurrence of Ford, BMW, Honda, and Volkswagen—while the federal government says California doesn’t have that power.

As of this writing, the Trump administration wants to partly strip California of its 50-year-old waiver allowing it to set its own rules and make the state heed the federal dictates on fuel economy. Sacramento has basically said, “We’ll see you in court, buckaroo.” The industry is divided but wishes all the regulators would make nice and adopt one national standard. And there’s a looming presidential election that could change everything.

Just as in 1970, the fate of the nation’s automobile regulations hinges on political intrigues. But with 717-hp Dodge Challenger Hellcats available today that meet all emissions requirements, it’s hard to argue that there hasn’t been huge progress in 50 years. “It’s really a heroic achievement in my lifetime,” acknowledges Car and Driver’s Bedard. “My record is thick with my inveighing against the EPA particularly, and government regulations in general. In some measure, they were just that of an immature person not well-informed about all the problems of the world.”

Albu, a California native who in retirement restores and maintains a fleet of 20 vintage Mopars—“The modeling shows that classic cars don’t contribute that much to smog due to limited use”—is grateful to have played a role in helping clean up his home state. “My dad was kind of a tough guy,” he says. “He made me go out and mow the lawn when the smog was the worst. When I came in from mowing the lawn, I could hardly breathe.” Though Los Angeles still fails to meet EPA standards for clean air and is leading the push for electric vehicles, the goop in the air is vastly reduced since then, he says.

“If we had this many vehicles in America without any cleanup, it would be impossible to live here.”

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UPDATE: We originally published this story in 2019. A lot changed with departments of motor vehicles during the pandemic, so we thought we’d take another look and update the various and sundry rules and regulations for registering a classic car in all 50 states.

There were a good handful of states – in New England particularly – that kind of flew under the radar as particularly classic car friendly, but some significant changes occurred in the last few years that changed that a bit. Specifically, Vermont closed a loophole that had previously allowed out-of-state residents to register vehicles there. Being a state that doesn’t require a title for vehicles 15 years old or older, it was a boon for people from other states that have a title requirement for all vehicles. We’ll get into greater detail in the Vermont section but suffice it to say that states are making it harder to register our older vehicles without titles.

What we wanted to figure out was whether your state was actually classic vehicle friendly and rank all 50 states by its overall consideration for older car owners. Some of our criteria are objective: Is there an emissions process? Is there a sales tax? Several of the criteria were more subjective: How car-friendly is the weather? How pleasant are the roads?

Our methodology took these items into account:

Registration: For classic car registration restrictions, we looked to every DMV website, and in some cases the state laws that govern them. If there were no restrictions, the state got 100 points. If there were restrictions for “parades and special events,” the state gets a 75. If there were day of the week and holiday restrictions, the score went to 50.

Inspections:  States typically either require a safety and/or emissions inspection or they don’t. For this yes or no question, a state either gets 100 points for No or zero points for Yes.

Sales tax: If the state has zero sales tax, it got 100 points. We took off 10 points for every percent of sales tax. Since it’s difficult – nigh on impossible — to build city and county taxes in, we indicated it in the text, but they’re not part of the score.

Title requirement: Some states (Vermont, for instance) don’t require a title for vehicles over a certain age. They got 100. Some states allow a surety bond. They got 50%. Some states like Massachusetts will not register a car without a title at all. They got zero.

Road quality and traffic: For road quality and traffic, we looked at the US News & World Report’s Transportation Ranking.

Weather: For weather, we checked the state’s annual snow and rainfall at Current Results.

Finally, we searched every state’s DMV website for information and talked to classic vehicle owners where we could for their opinions. Then we assigned a number grade for every criterion and averaged each out to come up with an overall score.

With nine categories and a possible 100-point score for each, a home run would be 900 points. No state achieved that lofty score, but several crossed the 800-point threshold. Two states didn’t manage 50 percent of the available points and Massachusetts – where this story is currently being revised? It’s only getting worse.

Which state is the most classic car friendly? Some of the answers may surprise you and the entire top ten is a little perplexing (We’re looking at you, Alaska).

From lowest score to highest, here’s how the states shook out:

Data is subject to change. Content is intended for informational purposes only. Check with your local motor vehicle department for current information.

50. Massachusetts

We can tell you from first-hand experience over the last 40 years of operating a motor vehicle that Massachusetts isn’t a great place to own a classic vehicle. The weather is the biggest disadvantage, as is MassDOT and the local highway departments, which blast the road surfaces with salt more or less constantly from November to April.

If that’s not bad enough, the Registry of Motor Vehicles is notoriously awful, assessing a 5.5% sales tax not on what you paid for your car, but what some arbitrary price guide says it’s worth. Williamstown resident David LaChance registered a 1966 Volvo P1800 project car that he hauled home on a trailer and wouldn’t be roadworthy for years. “They taxed it like it was a Pebble Beach candidate. Oh, yeah — they said don’t bother trying to appeal it.”

The one nice thing about Massachusetts is its rolling emissions requirement. If the car is older than 15 years old, you’re mostly in the clear. The emissions equipment that came on the car is supposed to still be there, but the inspection stations – all privately owned gas stations – aren’t likely to check. Massachusetts does have a mandated safety inspection. Your experience getting a sticker can be wildly different from shop to shop, so if you find one that’s willing to adhere a sticker to your windscreen with minimal fuss, stick with them.

49. California

Weather and the lack of a safety inspection is the only reason that classic car ownership in California is as good as it is. Everything else is a major impediment to driving a vintage vehicle.

Cars from 1975 or newer must have all of the original emissions equipment present on the vehicle when it was new when the car goes through a mandatory smog check. Frankly, we didn’t even check whether California requires a title from other states when registering a classic car, because the hassle of registering a post-1975 car from another state makes it not worth it. California is generally a classic car exporter rather than importer solely because of the smog regulations.

That’s not a bad thing for clean air, but it’s a really bad thing if you’re just trying to register a car for occasional use.

48. New Jersey

New Jersey is not particularly unfriendly to vintage cars. It offers historic plates and a lot of classic car owners seem to have them, likely because the registration fee is only $44, versus up to $84 depending on the year and weight of the vehicle. There’s also a Street Rod plate available for just $15, but it’s for vehicles built prior to 1949 that are registered in a NJ street rod club, or an affiliate of the National Street Rod Association.

The state follows the OBD-II era, 1996 or newer only requirement for emissions testing, which is great for most classic vehicle owners. Sales tax is steep at 6.625%, but there’s no annual excise tax.

Greg Giacchi owns a Datsun 280Z, a second generation Supra and a second-generation Trans Am, and comments, “No complaints here in NJ. Cars older than 25 years have antique status, which means no safety inspections and registration renewals are spaced out to either 3 or 5 year intervals. Overall I find this state to be lenient on vintage car ownership.” (Ed. Note: Since we originally ran this, it appears that the state’s classic vehicle registration runs for three years, but there’s no fee for renewal, another distinct Garden State benefit.)

We searched high and low on the DMV’s website and couldn’t find any exemption for titles, regardless of year, though. That can pose a real issue if you’re buying a vehicle from a state that doesn’t issue a title for an older car. Greg agrees: “I’ve only tried to register a vintage snowmobile without a title and that was a mess. They wanted me to place an ad in the newspaper public notices for 4 weeks before allowing me to proceed.” Oof.

New Jersey is congested, it’s a pretty small state and most of it is squeezed between major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. However, despite its reputation, New Jersey is a beautiful state away from the cities and does offer some nice driving.

47. Texas

Texas likes to brand itself as this free-wheeling Libertarian paradise, but registering a vintage car is just as complicated and costly as any other state, and sometimes more confusing.

We talked to Peter McCoullogh, who provided a ton of information about the law and how it’s practically enforced in Texas.

Sales tax for vintage cars is calculated on your bill of sale, which is a lot more legitimate that using some bogus price guide. “Texas has a SPV (Standard Presumptive Value) system to calculate sales tax values on most vehicles, but they do not use this system for anything 25+ years old. They will instead just charge you 6.25% of your indicated sale price, like most states normally practice,” Peter says.

The Lone Star State also has four different ways you can register a classic car. You can register it normally and pay a normal registration fee. You can register it as a Classic, which is for cars 25 years old or older for $40 per year with no driving restrictions. Or you can register it as an Antique for $10 per year – actually a $50 registration fee that’s good for five years before it has to be renewed — with the “exhibitions and special events” restrictions most states have. If your vehicle was manufactured before 1921, the fee drops to $40 for five years.

“Texas State Troopers have an absolute field day enforcing this,” according to Peter. “Counties like Harris and Ft. Bend are cracking down through their own law enforcement policy. Most people who abuse Antique Plates use the ‘I’m driving home from my mechanic’ excuse when they’re, but they’ve heard every excuse in the book. Unfortunately, enforcement is noticeably selective. The guy who drives his ’70 Nova to work and back every day will likely go a decade unscathed, but the dude in the FB RX7 wouldn’t last a week. If and when you do get busted, the officer has the right to impound your vehicle, and write you a citation for no registration.”

Texas ranks 37^th and 38^th in the US for commute time and road quality, so when you do get your classic registered, it doesn’t sound like you’ll have a great time driving it.

46. Vermont

Vermont has undergone one of the biggest, most painful changes for vintage car owners. The issue is not for residents, but non-residents who used to be able to register just about anything by taking a road trip to the state’s southernmost Department of Motor Vehicles. That loophole that allowed out-of-state registrations has closed, so if you had considered registering your classic vehicle without a title in that state, in order to get a valid registration that you could use to get your vehicle registered at home, you’re out of luck.

Vermont is deceiving because its numerical score is so low. What makes it great is how easy it is to deal with the DMV. The staff is generally terrific and the lines are amazingly short. There’s also no title required for anything 25 years old or older, although there’s an “Exempt Vehicle Title” form to fill out.

The problem is that the weather is not conducive to vintage vehicle operation from late October straight into May some years. Not only does it snow like crazy, most of the back roads are dirt and they turn to axle-snapping mud for about a month and a half after the snow melts. Many main roads can be completely buckled with frost heaves in the winter and spring.

On the plus side, traffic is generally light outside of the “cities” like Brattleboro and Burlington, and Vermont offers some of the greatest driving roads in New England when the weather is decent. (ED NOTE: Watch out, though. In the seven years your author was a resident of Vermont, he got more speeding tickets in that state than in any of the nearly 40 years of driving he’d done in Massachusetts and Maine.)

“Vermont pretty much leaves me alone,” says Michael Eldred, who has a handful of British cars registered in Southern Vermont. “Neither of my two pre-1960 vehicles needs to have seat belts retrofitted or pass any kind of emissions test to pass its annual safety inspection,” he says. “You can register your vehicle as an antique and pay a reduced fee, but that only entitles you to drive your vehicle in parades and to shows. As a result, few people register their antique cars as antiques.”

45. Tennessee

“Tennessee is pretty good,” says our vintage motorcycle collecting pal Somer Hooker. “Antique is over 25 years of age. You fill out an affidavit that it will only be driven on weekends or special events.” From there, the tag fee is a one-time event, with no renewal required. However, that’s only good for weekends and special events, and according to Somer, “If you are caught using on a regular basis it can be revoked.” The state notes that if that happens, you’re responsible for all the fees to register the vehicle as a general use vehicle.

“Vehicles over 25 years old can be titled on a Bill of Sale,” Somer notes. Tennessee abandoned emissions testing since the last time we posted this, so there’s no longer a requirement, regardless of your classic vehicle’s age.

Depending on where you are, you may see a couple of inches of snow a year in most of Tennessee, and the roads can be pretty spectacular. However, the tradeoff is Nashville. Traffic in and around the city can be outrageous.

44. Missouri

Missouri has some pretty stringent restrictions that come along with getting Historic plates, with no real obvious benefits for doing so, other than avoiding an annual registration renewal. The DVM’s website doesn’t say you can’t drive the car on a weekday, but if you’re driving it to a shop, it has to be within 100 miles of home, and you’re limited to just 1,000 miles of driving per year. The mileage restriction alone might steer you away from getting such a plate. A thousand miles a year isn’t much.

Taxation is also pretty brutal in Missouri, depending on your county. The state assesses a 4.25% sales tax, but then there are 24 pages worth of county taxes to research to find out how much more you owe. A cursory search reveals that your additional sales tax can be up to 5.5130%. There’s a handy tax calculator to figure out how much you’re going to owe.

One bit of good news is that Missouri allows an owner to bond a title if the original title isn’t present, making it much more friendly to register a car than some of the states in the Northeast, which just tell you to hit the bricks if you don’t have a title.

Historic registration doesn’t appear to get you out of the state’s biennial safety inspection, but you do avoid the emissions inspection in St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County or Jefferson County if your car is from 1996 or older. Throw in the average foot of snow lots of places in Missouri get every year and it’s not particularly old car friendly.

43. Hawaii

Hawaii is a weird state in terms of registering a car. There’s no state DMV, for example. Each island – essentially individual counties – runs its own licensing division. Trying to track down exactly what requirements they have is tricky.

Honolulu says “The vehicle must be a bona fide antique as defined in Section 249-1, HRS. ‘Antique motor vehicle’ means any motor vehicle of the age of thirty-five years or more from the date of manufacture, that is of the original factory specification or restored to the original specifications in an unaltered or unreconstructed condition, operated or moved on the highway primarily for the purpose of historical exhibition or other similar purposes.”

There are some beautiful roads in Hawaii, but US News & World Report ranks both the traffic and road quality near the bottom.

39. South Dakota

South Dakota’s historic vehicle plates apply to cars 30 years old or older. The sales tax is reasonable at 4.5%, but there’s also a steep excise tax of 4% that makes this one of the most tax-heavy states in the Union when registering a car.

The restrictions on classic vehicle plates seem relatively familiar, though there’s some room for interpretation. There’s no mileage restriction, for example, and the requirement says that you can’t use this registration for “daily transportation” to work. But if you took it to work a few Fridays a month through the summer, does that count as “daily transportation?”

South Dakota does require a title and doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful in providing information if you happen to have a car that either came from a state that doesn’t issue one for older cars or is missing its original title. That may or may not be a problem when the time comes to register it, but it’s tough to tell without some kind of documentation.

South Dakota ranked #1 in America for length of commute time, so traffic isn’t an issue, according to US News & World Report. It ranks about mid-pack in terms of road quality. The 45 inches of snow the state accumulates every year probably doesn’t help.

39. Maryland

Maryland has the same “weekends, holidays, and special events” clauses that most other states have, which means that you might not want to bother getting the antique or street rod plates if you plan on driving it to work occasionally.

It appears that Maryland requires a title for everything, regardless of age since there’s no exemption listed on the state’s page for registering a classic vehicle.

What’s nice about Maryland, though, is that it assesses its 6% sales tax on the value stated on the bill of sale if the vehicle is over seven years old. That’s a nice advantage when the NADA book value on a classic vehicle assumes that it’s in concours-ready condition, while you went and bought a $1,500 beater that you’re hoping to drive as you restore it.

The weather’s decent in coastal Maryland most of the year and snow isn’t that much of a concern, but Oakland County in the western part of the state gets an average of 80 to 100 inches of snow a year, leaving classic vehicles in the barn for a good chunk of the year.

39. Pennsylvania

Perhaps it’s because of things like the Hershey swap meet, the AACA headquarters, and the Carlisle events, but there seem to be more classic cars in Pennsylvania than just about anywhere. Does that have anything to do with how easy it is to register a classic vehicle there? Probably not.

Pennsylvania has two different vintage vehicle designations (Antique and Classic) with different restrictions. Classic car tags are available for anything older than 15 years old. Antique plates are for 25 years old or older.

The restrictions say that the “occasional use” of a classic or antique vehicle is “no more than one day a week” in bold letters, which seems pretty restrictive. “Classic cars have a permanent registration but require yearly inspection,” Brian Padnes learned after registering his 1984 Land Rover. “Inspections can be done by any licensed shop so most are kind to older vehicles. Antique are emissions exempt and I believe classic are too as they fall into the ‘drive less than 5k miles’ category for PA.”

Tax is pretty significant, too. There’s no excise tax, but the state sales tax is 6%. Registering a car in Allegheny County means you’ll pay an additional percent on top of that. If you register in Philadelphia, it’s 2% on top. “For cars older than 1976 (the last year the plates were dated) you can restore an old license plate for the vehicle with a year that matches,” Brian tells us. “I got my father an old dealer plate for his 1972 Volvo P1800ES.”

39. Indiana

Indiana has a historic vehicle registration program that requires you don’t use the car for daily transport, but other than that it doesn’t place any restrictions on days of the week or holidays. But there’s not much of a reason to get one, since you’re still going to pay the standard registration fee, excise tax, county tax, and another municipal excise tax.

The state does have an emissions program in two counties (Lake and Porter) and inspects cars for emissions every other year from 1975 forward, meaning you’ve got to have all of your original emissions equipment in place. Don’t toss those AIR pumps.

Tax is pretty hefty at 7% in Indiana, and on top of that, you owe an excise tax every year, but for vehicles older than 1980, it’s a $12 per year flat tax.

Indiana does require a title when you go to register your classic car. There doesn’t appear to be any exemption for age, so get that paperwork in order. With 22 inches of snow and 39 inches of rain every year, Indiana’s weather isn’t the greatest, but outside of the cities, the roads are well maintained and traffic isn’t absurd.

36. Rhode Island

Rhode Island gets a high numerical grade, mostly because of its relaxed Antique Vehicle requirements. If the vehicle is 25 years old or older, you can register it as an antique and skate on the state’s safety inspection requirements. However, if you do get it inspected, you can use it as a regular vehicle. If you don’t, the language from the DMV site notes: “The vehicle may be maintained solely for use in exhibitions, club activities, parades and other functions of public interest,” which isn’t great.

But the very next sentence says: “The vehicle may also be used for limited enjoyment and purposes other than the previously mentioned activities, but may not be used primarily for the transportation of passengers or goods over any public highway.”

This means as long as you’re not using it as a limousine or a cargo vehicle, you should be fine, although David Dennis does have a warning. “If you have a car that is 25 years old, but isn’t considered a ‘classic’ (think Honda CRX, or any average car from 1994), the police generally don’t know the actual rules and it can be a pain. I haven’t been targeted specifically, but have friends who regularly have arguments with officers trying to ticket him unlawfully despite the folder of information he carries with him at all times to show them.”

Where it falls apart is taxation. The state places a 7% sales tax on every vehicle, and you pay the higher of either the purchase price or the CPI Black Book. The CPI Black Book does have three grades of vehicle (Fair, Good, and Excellent), but basically overvalues anything that might be considered a restoration project. There is a Valuation Appeal process, but if it’s like every other state we have experience with, it’s not worth the time to fill out the paperwork.

The Ocean State also assesses a labyrinthine excise tax every year. Good luck figuring out how to determine how much you owe. If you can read this and make any sense of it, we’d suggest getting an advanced math degree because you’ve earned it.

36. North Carolina

North Carolina is really light on the information on its DMV site. We heard from Eric Seeger that the state is “rather friendly to antique cars. I learned this with a 1989 Grand Wagoneer and a 1992 BMW 525i wagon. If your vehicle is pre-OBDII, they require an annual “safety” inspection which can be done at any number of state-licensed privately-owned shops for probably less than $25.” Further research reveals that the cost for a safety inspection is a totally convenient and not at all arbitrary $13.60 in North Carolina, so make sure to have some change in the ashtray.

Sales tax is also remarkably low at 3% of the purchase price.  You’re also responsible for a “property tax” that can vary significantly based on where the county you reside in and the calculated value of the vehicle.

The state has a Property Tax Estimator online. We plugged in a $10,000 value in Charlotte and came out with an estimated tax of $167.87. Over a period of years, that’s a pretty hefty tax liability, especially if your car is worth some money.

The state’s inspection consists of a technician making sure that basic things are in order: tires are not bald, blinkers and wipers work.” Period-correct emissions equipment is supposed to be in place, as well, but that’s largely left up to the shop doing the inspection.

36. New Hampshire

Go one state north of Massachusetts and the weather gets even worse, locking a good percentage of the state in snow and ice for almost half the year, from just north of the state capitol in Concord all the way to the Canadian border.

We were a little unfair in our “poor” road quality assessment the last time. It mostly has to do with roads being damaged by the weather, which isn’t the fault of the state. We boosted the score by 25 points because whoever paves the roads in New Hampshire is a master of the craft. Fresh asphalt in New Hampshire is like a billiard table and you’ll know it instantly when you cross the border from Vermont, Massachusetts, or Maine.

Kristen Pratt said that registering her 1978 Jeep CJ-5 was a piece of cake. “Super easy to register here. Just need title (or bill of sale if applicable) for registration tags. Inspection is just like my 2018 Jeep, lights, tires, brakes etc. no emissions requirement,” she says. The title requirement is only for vehicles 20 years old or newer. New Hampshire doesn’t issue a title for vehicles older than that, either, so you save the title fee when you register. “NH has no sales or excise tax, they just have one registration fee, which is scaled according to age and value,” she says.

The one caveat, though is that while NH doesn’t have a sales tax, its registration fees can be pricey and weirdly kept a secret until you show up at city hall to register.

35. New York

New York is rather notorious for its sales tax, but the state only assesses a sales tax of 4%. The issue is the additional use tax tacked on by the county, which can be up to 4.5%. However, that means you don’t have an annual excise tax bill to pay, so when you compare it to a state like Massachusetts, it ends up being mostly a wash.

The title situation isn’t great, though. Where most states in the Northeast have a 20 or 25-year-old or newer title requirement, New York rolls that all the way back to 1972, making a valid title required paperwork if you’re looking to buy a vehicle out of state. Even for vehicles built before 1972, you need to fill out a Certification (Affidavit) of Sale or Transfer and a Title Application.

We gave New York a “Good” rating for Road Quality and Traffic, despite having one of the most traffic congested regions in America. That said, it’s a huge state, and it offers some amazing driving once you get outside of New York City and Albany. The run west along the Erie Canal basically parallels I-90, but get off the highway and explore some of New York’s state highways like NY Rte. 31 in western New York; NY Rte. 5 and 5S in the Mohawk Valley; NY Rte. 48, 481, and County Rte 57 along the Oswego Canal; NY Rte. 4 along the Champlain Canal. Truly beautiful. The southernmost part of NY west of Watkins Glen offers a low population and beautiful scenery.

34. Illinois

When we first wrote this we offered kudos to Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White for providing a thorough brochure on vintage car registration in the state of Illinois. Sadly, though, it looks like it hasn’t been updated since then, meaning all of the dates on the page are at least four years old. The long and short of it is that for $30, you can get a vintage car tag for five years, which is a pretty significant savings over a regular registration.

Sales tax is pricey, though. Illinois has a 7.25% sales tax to start with, and the county can ring you up for another quarter to three-quarters of a percent. If you live within the city of Chicago, there’s another 1.25% added on.

Despite Ferris Bueller’s adventure in the Ferrari, the weather and traffic in Chicago is brutal on a vintage car. Once you’re outside the city the roads open up, but it’s still a pretty short season, with 38 inches of snow in the middle of the state.

33. Virginia

Virginia is pretty clear about its antique plate usage and it’s not great news for people who like to drive. First of all, the statue says you can’t “exceed 250 miles from your residence.” Secondly, you can’t use your classic vehicle for general, daily transportation which “includes, but is not limited to, driving to and from work.” You can also use a pre-1976 Virginia license plate if you’d rather not use the state’s antique plates. If you’re planning on using your vehicle for more than just parades, that’s the route to take because it allows you to go through the regular inspection process.

Nevertheless, there’s a significant advantage to obtaining antique plates: you avoid the state’s annual safety inspection. Older vehicles are also exempt from the state’s emissions testing program, although, unlike many states that only make cars from the OBD-II era comply (beginning in 1996), Virginia pushes that back to 25 years.

Sales tax is relatively low at 4.15%. If the vehicle is more than five years old, the tax is calculated based on a state-provided Vehicle Price Certification form, so you’re not left to the inconsistent values in a NADA price guide, especially if your car is less than perfect. Like Maryland, a lot of places in Virginia get snow in the winter, so you’ll have your classic car stored at least a few months during the year.

32. South Carolina

South Carolina is a pretty great place to have a vintage vehicle. It does have the familiar weekends, holidays and special events restrictions for antique vehicle registration, but the fees are just $10 for registration and $15 for a title. You can get a Year of Manufacture plate for anything over 30 years old. That allows you to avoid the weekends and holidays restrictions, but you pay a fee just the way you would for a normal registration.

Beyond that, the Palmetto State did away with its safety inspection back in the mid-1990s. You can argue that’s not a great thing for road safety in general, but not having to worry about it or pay for it every year is a boon to classic car owners here. There’s also no emissions requirement, meaning South Carolina vintage car owners skate on all the annual annoyances, regardless of how old their car is.

Sales tax is moderate at just 5%, and outside of Charlotte, the roads are in comparably decent shape and uncrowded. The higher elevations get snow, but for the most part, South Carolina’s coastal communities will go years without seeing the white stuff.

30. Florida

Florida’s weather alone makes it friendly to vintage cars. The state has several designations for older cars including Antique, Street Rod, and Horseless Carriage for cars manufactured before 1945.

On the one hand, it’s hard to see why bother getting an antique plate, because the state has neither a safety nor an emissions inspection program at all, never mind for vintage cars. But you’ll want the plate to save on what Florida calls the “Initial Registration,” a hefty $225 fee it collects the first time you register your car in the state. That fee is waived for cars bearing antique plates, and the fees for Antique, Street Rod, and Horseless Carriage tags are permanent, meaning you pay them once and you’re good for the entire time you own it.

The bad news is that – according to the application – everything needs an existing title, a hurdle that’s a challenge for a lot of people who buy a restoration project with plans to register it at some point in the future.

Florida gets essentially no snow every year, and outside the cities the roads are in great shape.

30. Maine

Several things have changed in Maine that owners of classic vehicles need to pay attention to. The big one is that the state is arbitrarily refusing to register Japanese kei-class trucks like the Subaru Sambar and Mitsubishi Minicab, which have been incredibly popular there thanks to four-wheel drive and efficient operation.

It’s a huge issue that’s eventually going to either bite the state or owners of ALL vehicles that meet the DOT’s 25-year cutoff for legal importation. Maine has not only refused to register these vehicles but has gone so far as to cancel the plates on vehicles it previously registered.

Like the pandemic, this contagion has spread to other states, making it harder to register these vehicles. Under the guise of “safety” the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA – you know, the people who like the tax and licensing revenues from new vehicles that cost an average of $45,000 in 2023) has been advising its members to not register these vehicles at all.

Outside of having a requirement that you have a daily driver to get antique plates, Maine is pretty light on the antique plate restriction, but it does require a safety inspection of all vehicles. Emissions tests are only required in Cumberland County (where Portland is, basically), and only for cars newer than 1996. There’s a sales tax and an excise tax, but you don’t need a title for anything older than 1996, so if you buy an older car from Maine, you’ll only need a current registration and a bill of sale, and honestly, we registered a vehicle there without a current reg.

One fact interesting to owners of trailered cars is that anybody can register a trailer in the State of Maine, regardless of your state of residence. The fees are super cheap, so if your state dings you for registering your wacky single-wheel trailer you tow behind your Beetle, give Maine a shot.

We dropped the road quality number into the “Fair” territory because Maine roads especially in the southern portion of the state – where the people live — are getting pretty rough.

Andrew Baca has a bunch of vintage scooters, a Corvair Greenbrier van, and now a Corvair-powered UltraVan registered in Maine. “One weird thing in Maine is that you can use a vintage plate on your antique vehicle as long as you keep the official plate in the vehicle,” he says. “I find this odd. They would not let me register the vehicle with the vintage plate.”

29. Washington

Washington would get a much higher score if traffic and road conditions weren’t rated 42nd and 40th by the U.S. News & World Report. The restrictions on classic car registration include “club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and occasional pleasure driving,” but there isn’t a day-of-the-week or non-holiday clause like some other states.

Jason Bagge has owned and registered hundreds of classic cars in Washington and suggests the way to register one is to find a set of correct year plates for your car’s model year and register it that way. “A collector plate limits you to non-daily use,” he says, “but what if you buy a set of old school plates that were made when the car was new, you can register them as ‘restored’ plates. These are daily driver plates that can still wear original 1970s tabs.”

For 38 years, Washington had an emissions testing program, but it was eliminated on January 1, 2020, for all vehicles, in all counties.

We’re giving the state a full “No” for a title requirement to register a classic car. Technically you do need a title, but if you don’t have one you can register the car for three years without one at all, or get a bonded title, as spelled out in Washington Administrative Code Title 308  Chapter 56A Section 210.

28. Connecticut

We were ready to hammer Connecticut because its Department of Motor Vehicles is notoriously awful. (Ed. Note: Still is. At the time of this writing, the Classic Vehicle Registration section of the CT DMV’s website offered nothing but a helpful runtime error.)

But a handful of Constitution State residents chimed in to defend its honor on a couple of counts. First off, Connecticut has a long history of offering a major tax break on vintage cars. For tax purposes, a vehicle that is older than 20 years old and historically significant only has a tax value of $500. That can save a lot of bucks versus registering a vehicle just a few miles north in Massachusetts, where a $500 Falcon can easily cost a multiple of that in sales tax based on the book value of a fully restored vehicle.

Dillon Troxell weighed in that you get that tax break whether you decide to get “Early American Vehicle” or “Classic Vehicle” plates, which don’t carry any significant restrictions to use. David Pollock notes that while a current registration is required if a vehicle is old enough to not need a title, Connecticut will “give you an affidavit that the seller fills out and gets notarized,” which is a whole lot better than a lot of states.

Dillon Troxell notes, “Car registration is the only thing CT doesn’t kill you on (yet).”

27. Delaware

Delaware’s numerical score is slightly downgraded mostly because of the restrictions on classic vehicle registrations. Antique vehicle registration is open to anything older than 25 years, but the restrictions are fairly well defined: Cars with an antique plate “shall be used only for participation in club activities, exhibits, tours, parades, and similar uses, but in no event shall it be used for general transportation,” according to the Delaware DMV. Delaware also offers “Street Rod” registration for 1970 or older vehicles that have been extensively modified.

The title requirement is not good, though. From what we can see, everything requires a title, regardless of its age. That’s a challenge if you’ve bought a restoration project.

Delaware gets good marks for sales tax. However, it does charge a “Documentation Fee,” which is 4.5% of the vehicle sale price, or the NADA value, whichever is higher. Call it what you like, but that’s still a tax. Antique registration means that you pay $25 once for an inspection, and never have to pay for it again.

Delaware’s weather is better in the winter months than most of the Northeast states, extending the driving season by a month or so.

26. Wisconsin

Wisconsin hates round numbers, apparently, because it charges a 5 percent sales tax, plus a .5% county tax. As of April 2020, the state no longer charges a .1% “Stadium Tax” to register a car. The Stadium Tax afforded Wisconsin residents the privilege of paying for the $290 million Miller Park for the last 25 years, all to watch the Brewers lose in the playoffs every time they get there (This year it was to the Arizona Diamondbacks.)

But we digress. Wisconsin also has antique vehicle registration, but only for cars built before 1945. There’s no safety or emissions to avoid (unless your car is from 1996 or later, and you live near Milwaukee).

There’s a title requirement, but in recent years, it’s gotten a lot easier to buy a heap without a title and register it legally. The process requires a surety bond worth 1.5 times the value of the vehicle (which comes from a price guide with the vehicle in “number 5 or 6” condition). A vehicle valued at $5,000 to $6,000 could get a surety bond for around $100. With that in place, you can get yourself a title. That’s a major convenience versus many other states that won’t give you the time of day without a title.

Wisconsin weather is completely offensive to old car ownership, though. You’ll probably forget what the car looks like it’s in storage so long.

25. Louisiana

According to what we could find on the Louisiana DMV website getting a vintage vehicle plate is slightly more involved than other states. The state requires that you fill out an affidavit that says you haven’t modified the vehicle from its original form.

If the vehicle is 25 years old or older, you don’t need a title to register, but again, that requires some paperwork. You need an affidavit signifying a physical inspection by the police, a notarized bill of sale, and a statement saying you’re part of a classic car club, which appears to be unique to Louisiana. And those vintage vehicle tags come with a significant set of restrictions now: “… such vehicle shall be used primarily for special occasions such as exhibitions, club activities, parades, or other functions of the public interest, or for necessary testing, maintenance, and storage purposes.”

There’s no emissions testing requirement, but vehicles built after 1980 have to have their original emissions equipment present during the annual safety inspection in Ascension, East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Livingston, and West Baton Rouge counties.

Tax can get rather expensive, too. The state assesses a 4% sales tax, but counties can hold you up for up to an additional 6% in sales tax depending on where you live.

24. Oklahoma

We gave Oklahoma a hard time the last time we ran this story because it seemed to want to keep any information about registering a classic car under heavy wraps until you’ve stood in line for three hours at the DMV. There’s more information in a PDF provided by the state now, but it’s still pretty slim. Most states cut you a break by making classic registrations a one-time fee, but not Oklahoma. It’s a $19 annual fee. If you want it for ten years, it’s $86, which saves you over a hundred bucks in registration fees, but you’re better off in other states that have a one-time fee.

Despite what appears in our scorecard, Oklahoma DOES require a title for classic cars, but it also accepts a nominally priced surety bond in place of a title if the car you’re interested in is missing one (something to keep in mind when negotiating a price with a seller.)

The traffic in Oklahoma is generally pretty light, which scored the state an 11^th ranking in US News & World Report. Its road quality is pretty dismal, though, placing it 37^th in the US.

23. Michigan

Considering it’s locked in snow for four months a year, the roads are in deplorable condition and – well, Detroit – Michigan fares well in the vintage vehicle friendliness rankings, mostly because of the registration requirements.

“I had a super easy time getting a title for a Honda S90 I bought with a bill of sale several years back,” Evan McCausland tells us. The state does require you to fill out the Uniform Surety Bond in lieu of a title. The requirements for a Historic vehicle plate are kind of remarkable. Yes, you’re only supposed to be using the car for events and pleasure driving, but there’s no distinction on what days of the week you can drive it.

What’s really interesting in Michigan is the month of August: With a Historic plate, you can drive your car every day, including for general transportation to and from work. That’s a pretty sweet deal, especially if you’re headed to the Woodward Dream Cruise in the middle of the month.

22. Georgia

In almost every instance, Georgia rocks as far as classic vehicle ownership goes. Georgia doesn’t appear to have an annual safety inspection, nor does it have emissions requirements (A) for vehicles older than 1996 or (B) for any vehicles registered outside the Atlanta Metro area.

We placed an asterisk next to the classic vehicle restrictions section because they weren’t evident on the DMV website. Your mileage here may vary. The plates are comparatively expensive versus other states – $80 up front and $55 to renew every year – and don’t really provide any benefits since you’re not avoiding inspections.

Joe Severns noted that years ago, he only needed a bill of sale on a 1964 Mercedes-Benz Heckflossë some years ago, but the state’s website notes that titles are required for 1962 and newer cars now. “As the car had been a barn car (that ran and moved under its own power – but lacked safe brakes, tires and working safety belts,” he says. “Maybe Ralph Nader should have lobbied Georgia for a safer registration process that would include a safety inspection. Ad valorem taxes may also be required depending on the year of the vehicle. ’The government do take a bite.’”

That seven percent sales tax is applied at registration and is calculated by the state, not your bill of sale, which isn’t great, depending on which wildly inaccurate source the state bases its value on.

On the plus side, Georgia gets about 2.9 inches of snow every year, so you’re safe never really storing the car for the winter, and outside of Atlanta Metro, the roads in the region are spectacular.

21. West Virginia

West Virginia does have $66.50 per year antique vehicle restrictions that conform with the “weekends, holidays, and special events” restrictions of other states in the region, but the requirements don’t seem as strict as those laid out in Virginia.

You can either select the antique plates provided by the state or if you have a 1973 or earlier vehicle, you can opt for plates with a year marking that matches the year of your vehicle.

West Virginia doesn’t have an emissions inspection, so you don’t have to worry about that at all if your vintage car interests include cars from the 1990s. Unfortunately, it appears that West Virginia still requires titles for anything, so that may put a wrinkle in your plans. If you opt for the antique plates, you don’t have to worry about safety inspections, either. The sales tax is relatively spendy at 6%, but it appears to be calculated on the bill of sale, which is a huge advantage versus calculation by a NADA price guide.

West Virginia has some of the most amazing roads in the East, and traffic is relatively light compared to other states in the mid-Atlantic region. The weather cooperates most of the year, but you’ll definitely see snow a few months out of the year.

20. Kansas

Kansas is another state that actually seems motivated to provide information to its constituents about registering classic cars. Not only does it have a clearly written statute laying out the lenient requirements and restrictions for historic plates (KSA 8-172, if you’re interested), but the Kansas Highway Patrol has provided an excellent pamphlet on title requirements. Whether you have an out-of-state title or a Bill of Sale, you’re required to have the VIN inspected by the Highway Patrol. Antique plates are available for a $40 one-time fee, avoiding annual renewals.

That’s the plus side. On the negative side is Rick Lyda’s experience: “I brought my ‘61 Willys CJ5 to Kansas from Colorado,” he says. “I had to get it inspected by the Highway Patrol before I could tag it. They only do inspections on Tuesday and Thursday between nine and noon. That made me have to pay two days extra trailer rental and miss a day of work just to get the pleasure of paying $25 and spending a half hour arguing with the guy about the six-digit VIN.”

The roads rank pretty high according to US News and World Report at #15, and the commute time is the 8^th best in America.

19. Iowa

Iowa has Antique vehicle registration, but we’re not sure there’s any point to obtaining it other than vanity.

After 2009, if you get Antique plates, you’re subject to the restrictions (only driven to and from state and county fairs or educational exhibits, must never use it as daily transport), but the fee is the same as any regular car. It doesn’t look like there’s any break on the 5% sales tax, either. Iowa House Bill 2251 introduced the idea of a cheaper state-provided year of manufacture plate, but that bill appears to have gone nowhere since 2022.

According to the state’s general laws, Iowa requires a title for all vehicles at the time of registration and there’s no language obvious that allows any kind of surety bond in its place.

Add that Iowa gets 39 inches of rain and 29 inches of snow every year, and you’re looking at a pretty low score.

18. Colorado

Colorado is like most other states in that it offers a Historic vehicle tag with a few minor restrictions. There are some confusing instructions to keep in mind, though:

The state has a graduated emissions testing program for cars in nine counties in populated areas. Vehicles older than 1975 registered as collector cars are exempt from emissions testing.

Cars from 1976 to 1984 that were registered as collector cars prior to 2009 and have not let that registration lapse are exempt from emissions testing.

Cars 32 years old that were not registered prior to 2009 must have an initial emissions inspection, then be reinspected every five years, and must not drive more than 4,500 miles per year. Is that clear enough?

Emissions inspections are at government-run facilities. “Wait times are posted online and there’s one about 5 minutes from my house,” Andrew Ganz tells us. “I’ve never waited more than 10 minutes, though it’s ironic that you sit idling outside the facility.”

The second thing to take note of in Colorado – like Arkansas, New Mexico, and a handful of other states – is its titling requirements. If your older car doesn’t have a title, you can still register it with a surety bond, as in many other states. However, if your vehicle is NOT roadworthy, older than 25 years of age, and physically located in Colorado, you can get what’s called a “Rebuilder’s Title” to keep with the car as it’s being restored. Once it’s again in roadworthy shape, you can use that Rebuilder’s Title as the basis to get a clean Colorado title. That’s a unique win for restorers in Colorado.

Unfortunately, Colorado ranks 30^th in commute time and 29^th in road quality, according to US News & World Report.

17. New Mexico

New Mexico Statute 66-3-27 NMSA 1978 lays out the requirements for its “Horseless Carriage” registration. The restrictions are the basic “special events and car shows” type, but there’s no restriction on days of the week or miles per year. It’s kind of odd that a car from 1984 can be registered as a “Horseless Carriage,” but that’s the statute.

The fee is $14.50 for the first five-year registration period, then $9.50 every subsequent five years afterward.

There’s a version of Colorado’s “rebuilder’s title” in New Mexico that allows a car to be restored over time and then inspected at the time of registration for a clean New Mexico title.

New Mexico ranks as #14 in America in terms of short commutes, but unfortunately ranks at #41 for road quality, according to US News & World Report.

15. Arizona

Arizona has up to four special plates for older cars. Classic Car plates are reserved for those recognized by the Classic Car Club of America. Historic Vehicle is for those 25 years old or older. Street Rod is for 1948 or earlier with modifications. Horseless Carriage is for 1915 or earlier. None seem to carry much in the way of major restrictions, which is great in a state where the sun shines most of the year.

Jeff Koch tells us that “Arizona’s emissions standards vary by county. In Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, any car 1975 or later needs emissions testing UNLESS you get collector insurance,  then the emissions requirement is waived. Collector-car or antique plates are not necessary for collector-car insurance,” a nice benefit for Arizona’s Hagerty customers.

He also notes that “Used car buyers who buy from a private seller are not required to pay sales tax on the transaction.”

Road quality puts Arizona in the top 25 percent of US states, while its road quality ranks at #33, according to US News & World Report.

15. Nevada

Nevada’s classic car plates (of which there are SEVEN, by the way) come with an age and mileage restriction. The vehicle has to be 25 years old (or older for Old Timer or Horseless Carriage tags), and can only be driven 5,000 miles a year.

Changes to Nevada’s classic registration program went into effect in 2021. Nevada now requires that anything with a classic vehicle plate also have collector car insurance: “You must show the Declarations page from your insurance policy as proof that the vehicle is covered by Nevada insurance that is specifically designated for classic or antique vehicles and meets the minimum liability coverage. You must submit this at your next renewal or at the time you first obtain plates.”

The weather is generally conducive to old car ownership, the roads are fantastic outside of Las Vegas and you can register a car with a bond if the title is missing. Only relatively high taxation keeps the state out of the running for the best state in the Union for classic ownership.

14. Wyoming

US News & World Report ranked Wyoming #2 for commute time and #3 for road quality in the United States, making this a paradise in the few months the state isn’t buried under the multiple feet of snow it receives.

Classic vehicle restrictions are fairly light, in that the car is only supposed to be used for exhibitions, events, and pleasure driving, but there’s no restriction on the days or mileage one can drive. Plus, the registration fee is a more than reasonable ten bucks. And that appears to be a one-time fee since it doesn’t say “per year” on the application. You can spend $50 for an embossed plate if you like, otherwise, you get one with vinyl letters and numbers affixed.  Sales tax isn’t too terrible at 4% and there’s no safety or emissions requirement to deal with.

Like several other states, everything has to have a title regardless of age, but if it doesn’t you can get a surety bond. It’s just going to cost you, depending on how valuable the car is. And all of the title paperwork happens at the county clerk’s office, rather than at the DMV, meaning you have another trip ahead of you.

13. Ohio

Ohio does have restrictions for Historical vehicle plates, but the requirements don’t seem onerous, and given the fact that you see an awful lot of them around at car shows, they’re probably worth having versus standard registration.

The application notes that the vehicle can’t be used for general transport, but there are no real restrictions on mileage, days of the week, or distance from home: “A historical motor vehicle shall not be used for general transportation, but may be operated on the public roads and highways to and from a location where maintenance is performed on the vehicle.” That’s open to a pretty wide interpretation.

Ohio doesn’t have a safety inspection, and there’s a 25-year cap for emissions requirements, so most of us are out of the woods. Sales tax can get pretty steep when you throw in the 2.25% county tax, but there’s a cap of $700.

11. Idaho

Idaho’s vintage car registration scheme is pretty confusing. For $25 initially – and then $3 every three years afterward – you can get an “Idaho Classic” plate for any vehicle 30 years old or older that hasn’t been modified at all.

That entitles you to ONLY use your vehicle in “exhibits, parades, tours, club activities and such occasional use as is necessary for operation and maintenance of the vehicle.” If you want to drive it for ANY other purpose, you need a regular registration, which ALSO has to be displayed.

Then there’s an “Idaho Old Timer” plate for anything manufactured before January 1, 1943. Again, that dual-plating requirement is the same, meaning you have to pay for two registrations on the same vehicle. Fees are the same as for the “Idaho Classic” plate.

For anything built before 1973, you can also get a Year of Manufacture plate for $25, then $15 per year thereafter.

There’s also a Street Rod plate, for is anything manufactured before 1949 and modified to qualify as a “street rod.” That fee is $25, $15 per year renewal and a plate fee of $6.

Finally, there’s also a Corvette plate but you don’t have to put it on a Corvette. The reason to affix a Corvette plate to your 1988 Mercury Topaz is that it funds children’s programs in the state.

The last time we ran this story, Idaho had some emissions requirements, but the legislature passed a law eliminating all emissions testing in the state as of July 1, 2023.

Idaho has a provision for titling a car more than ten years old that doesn’t have a title. It’s a rather lengthy and detailed procedure, but at least it exists, without the requirement of purchasing an often expensive surety bond. You can read about the Provisional Title procedure here.

Idaho’s traffic ranks 9^th in the US, and its road quality puts it at 19^th.

11. Alaska

Obviously, a lot of Alaska is buried in snow and ice for a good chunk of the year, but otherwise, it’s pretty classic car-friendly. Alaska has two types of plates for people like us: Historic Vehicle plates are for those older than 30 years of age and carry all of the usual restrictions on where and when the vehicle can be used. The bonus is that the plates are only $10 and you don’t have to renew.

Custom Collector Vehicle plates are for vehicles from 1949 or older, or a replica version of those cars. There’s also a pretty stiff set of requirements including hydraulic brakes, sealed beam or halogen headlamps (no mention of LEDs), seat belts for all occupants, turn signals activated by a switch (instead of osmosis or ESP, presumably), safety glass or lexan windows, electric or vacuum wipers, standard or blue dot taillamps, and a parking brake that operates “at least two wheels on the same axle.”

We put an asterisk next to Sales Tax because Alaska has no state sales tax. Depending on where you live, the municipality can charge anywhere from 0% to 7.5% sales tax, though, so be aware of that.

Given its inclement weather, Alaska still ranks pretty high on the US News & World Report roads index, ranking 5^th in the country for commute time, and 28^th in the nation for road quality.

10. Mississippi

Mississippi doesn’t make finding information on vintage vehicle registration all that easy, but the requirements for doing so appear pretty lax. There’s not much on the state’s Department of Revenue site except for the fact that yes, you can get an antique tag, and the fee is $28. We looked for any kind of requirements and couldn’t find any. We’d assume that there’s a year cap, but good luck finding it.

What is clear is that as long as the previous owner had two years’ worth of previous registrations, you don’t need a title. 35.VII.06.1 Part 7, Subpart 6, Chapter 1 of the Mississippi Administrative Code says:

When applying for a Certificate of Title on a used vehicle that has not been previously titled, the following supporting documents must accompany the title application:

1. A certificate copy of Current Bill of Sale.
2. A certified copy of Previous Bill of Sale or certified copy of two years Tag and Tax receipts of previous owner.

There’s no inspection – emission or safety – and you can drive year ‘round, so congrats on a high score, Mississippi.

8. Alabama

Alabama makes it really easy for vintage car owners to register vehicles. According to the Commissioner of Licenses in Calhoun County, Barry E. Robertson’s website, “Automobiles and trucks 35 years old and older do not require titles,” which gets you all the way back to 1988 as of this year. If you don’t catch this in 2023, that creeps up to 1989, a boon, especially for you classic Japanese fans who may have still had to title vehicles from the 1980s.

It has restrictions for vintage tags, but we applied half credit here because the restrictions don’t say anything about weekends and holidays only, or anything about mileage caps. The vehicle only has to be over 30 years old and “operated as a collector’s item, including participation in club activities, exhibitions, tours, parades, and not used for general transportation purposes.”

It’s super cheap, too. The tags are only fifteen bucks, and taxes – including the state tax and any county tax – are 4% at most. It can be lower than that depending upon the county.

The weather in Alabama – outside of hurricanes and tornadoes – is pretty great, averaging less than an inch a year in most parts of the state. The road quality and traffic can be amazing, once you’re outside of Birmingham and Montgomery.

8. Montana

The weather is about the only reason not to be excited to own a vintage car in Montana. The state does impose the normal “special events and parades” restriction for historic plates, which you can research in the appropriate Montana code. Unlike any other state we know of, there’s a rather arbitrary sliding scale based not on age or the type of plate, but on the vehicle’s GROSS WEIGHT. If it’s under the completely rational figure of 2,850 pounds, it’s $25. If it’s over that, it’s $30.  Picture this: You drive a Triumph TR7 with a 2,820-lb. gross weight and your buddy with the TR6 weighs in at 3,042. If you can figure out the reasoning behind his registration costing $5 more, you’re ahead of us.

But other than that, it’s something of a paradise – both in general and for classic car owners.

First and foremost, it doesn’t impose a sales tax on cars at all. The money saved in tax resulted in a cottage industry of shady folks that would set up a Montana LLC specifically to register a car to the company, and then lie about the place where it was domiciled. Don’t do that. You’re begging for (A) an audit and (B) your insurance company to not pay a claim when your car burns up in a garage in New Jersey.

US News and World Report says that Montana ranks #4 in America for short commute times, and #11 in terms of road quality, so you’ll be able to enjoy the car when it’s registered.

6. Oregon

Oregon fares well because of its excellent quality roads, its decent traffic outside the metro areas, and the fact that it doesn’t have a sales tax at all. Depending on where you live you could see a ton of snow, but even then, Oregon doesn’t use salt, so cars and trucks tend to be in relatively rust-free condition after a lifetime of use.

You need to know math to figure out if you can get an antique plate in Oregon, though, so English majors may be out of luck. Here’s how it’s described on the application: “To determine the year model eligible subtract 1900 from the current year and divide that number by two. The vehicle must be this year’s model or older.” This sounds harder than one of those word problems involving trains leaving two cities at the same time.

There’s a title requirement and you can read more about it in Oregon’s general laws. Jeff Zurschmeide notes that registering a classic from out of state requires a VIN inspection. “If you bring a car in from out of state, Oregon requires a VIN inspection. They just make sure the VIN on the dash (or wherever) matches the title. My only VIN challenge was on a 1920 Model T, which didn’t have serial numbers until 1925. They make you go to the State Police station and get approval. Not a problem – Model Ts are not high theft vehicles.”

He also notes that the enforcement of “daily use” is pretty lax. “The DMV will give you a stern warning that cars with SP plates may ONLY be driven on special occasions, such as to car shows or club meetings, or to be serviced and repaired. I suppose if you got ticketed for speeding or something, they might add on charges for improperly driving on SP plates, but I take my ’56 pickup to the lumber yard and haven’t been hassled.”

6. Nebraska

Here’s a novel concept: Nebraska actually provides a decent amount of information on registering a classic vehicle on its website. Finding this information in other states can be a real time sink.

Vehicles with Historic plates are subject to the “parades and special events” restrictions of most other states, but there doesn’t appear to be a mileage cap or a day-of-the-week restriction. It’s a little difficult learning the difference between a Vintage Plate and a Historical Plate, other than that the Historical Plate description says you need to have another vehicle registered with normal passenger vehicle plates.

As far as titles, there’s a fair bit of information worth reading at the DMV’s website. If the car is from 1940 or prior, you may not need a title at all. There are also different titling requirements for “Assembled Classic Motor Vehicles” that are 30 years old and have had significant modifications.

Nebraska ranks #6 in America for commute time and #12 for road quality, so the driving experience can be pleasant, provided you don’t mind going arrow-straight most of the time. The average 30 inches of snow aren’t great, but Nebraska doesn’t use salt on the roads, which makes it a good source of finding decent classic vehicles that haven’t rotted to the roofline.

5. North Dakota

Weather is about the only thing that makes North Dakota a little less appealing for vintage car owners. Yes, it gets more than 50 inches of snow every year, severely restricting the amount of driving time you’ll get, and it’s one of the states in the Salt Belt that treat the roads with the metal-eating substance. But the rest of the state’s vehicle-related attributes are remarkable.

The state does impose usual restrictions on vehicles with Historic plates. Interestingly, North Dakota has “Pioneer” plates for cars older than 40 years of age that don’t seem to carry the same “parade use only” restrictions that the Collector plates do, according to the .pdf on the DMV’s website.  Either is a one-time registration fee — $160 for collector cars and just $10 for Pioneer tags — and there’s no safety or emissions requirement, so you’re in the clear there.

Sales tax is a mid-level 5%. Titles are required, but if you don’t have one, there’s a process requiring an inspection that at least will provide a pathway to legal citizenship. US News & World Report ranked North Dakota #2 in road quality and #3 in commute time, meaning you won’t be spending a lot of your time idling in traffic.

4. Utah

Utah comes in with a strong score, limited only by its relatively high sales tax and the “parades and special events” restrictions on cars registered as classic vehicles.

Classic registration is cheap at just $17 – a buck more than when we first ran this story – and you only pay the fee once as long as the car is registered. There’s also a $4 postage and handling fee. Classic vehicles from model year 1982 or older are exempt from emissions testing. From model year 1983 forward to the rolling 30-year cutoff, emissions testing may be required in counties that require it.

Utah is also great if your vehicle doesn’t happen to have a title. Anything older than 1988 doesn’t need a title at all. You’ll only need a bill of sale to register the vehicle.

Utah has some absolutely spectacular roads, and it ranks 12^th in terms of traffic according to US News & World Report. Its road quality is 21^st in the US according to the publication.

3. Arkansas

Arkansas gets a pretty phenomenal score, falling down only on the sales tax portion of the assessment. Not only does the state ring you up for a relatively high 6.5%, but the county and the city can both wet their beaks, too, adding another percentage point or so to what you owe for the privilege of buying a car.

One interesting note, though. If the car you register costs less than $4,000, you don’t owe a sales tax at all, a boon for us who like to buy beaters and improve them as we drive.

Arkansas does have an antique vehicle plate, but it’s only for vehicles 45 years or older, rather than the 25-year cutoff most states use. The good news is that it’s only seven bucks, and there’s no renewal required.

Arkansas has no safety or emissions inspections and will allow a bonded title if the original title is missing. Add in the fact that the weather is generally good, and the traffic isn’t bad outside of Little Rock and the Land of Opportunity ends up scoring remarkably well.

2. Kentucky

We looked at every form on the Kentucky DMV website and couldn’t find one for antique or historic vehicles, and there isn’t any designation for vintage or classic vehicles on the standard registration form, so registering a vintage car in Kentucky looks like it’s just like registering anything else. Kentucky also offers a title for classic vehicle projects, so you can work on the vehicle until such time as it’s roadworthy, then apply to transfer that to a regular title with no salvage, junk, or rebuilt markings.

That’s not so bad because there isn’t a safety or emissions inspection that a vintage vehicle plate would help you avoid. The sales tax in Kentucky is a moderate six percent, and there’s no excise tax to contend with on an annual basis.

There’s a good explanation of the title procedure on the DMV website that’s worth looking at. If you’re bringing a vehicle 25 years old or older into Kentucky from another state, you don’t necessarily need a title for it. The vehicle can be taken to a sheriff’s office for VIN verification and then the owner can apply for a new Kentucky title.

1. Minnesota

Despite its generally lousy weather, Minnesota wins an excellent score for vintage car friendliness.

Start with the restrictions on vintage tags: None to speak of. The car has to be 25 years old, and you need to have another car registered as a daily driver – which you’d need to have to get Hagerty Classic Car insurance to begin with – but beyond that, there are no other restrictions. If the vehicle you’re registering doesn’t have a title, you can get a bonded title, and you’d get the bond back after three years along with a clean title.

Sales tax on a vintage car is a flat $125 fee, plus $25 in a one-time tax, regardless of how much you paid for the car. That’s a massive savings if your emotions ran high at one of the Arizona auctions and you came home with a $50,000 car. Ordinarily, your tax liability would be $3,000 on a purchase like that.

Add good roads, and relatively easy traffic outside the city and it really adds up to one of the most vintage car-friendly states in the northern part of the country.

So there you have it, classic car owners. Let us know what you think. Are our numbers accurate or do you think your state is way more classic-car-friendly than we’ve given it credit for? Make your case in the comments below … and congratulations, Minnesota.

***

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The post How classic car-friendly is your state? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If automotive-safety advocate Ralph Nader is right, what I’m about do has an uncomfortably high percentage of ending in disaster. I’m in a 1960 Chevrolet Corvair, one with a manual transmission and just 39,672 miles on the clock. An expanse of wide concrete runway—a portion of Detroit’s Coleman Young Airport—stretches out ahead. My intention is to accelerate to a modest speed and then abruptly turn the wheel back and forth to see what the car will do.

Despite decades of experience racing and testing cars, I’m nervous. In his 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader called the Corvair “the one-car accident.” He wrote that a design flaw in the rear suspension made the car likely to flip over when driven in abrupt maneuvers, like, say, avoiding a ball that suddenly rolled into the street. The book was a bestseller and has been inextricably linked to the Corvair ever since.

I’ve always wondered if Nader’s claims were fair. Peter Koehler, a former GM engineer who’s owned dozens of Corvairs, including the one I’m about to test, claims the Corvair wasn’t inherently flawed, it was just different. In car circles, Nader is credited with effectively killing Chevy’s small car. Brock Yates, the longtime Car and Driver columnist who wielded a wonderfully sharp pen, regularly vilified Nader. Yates lumped Nader into a group he referred to as the “Safety Nazis.” Nader’s book helped usher in a host of emissions and safety regulations that hobbled performance. The muscle cars of the rah-rah ’60s gave way to the Pintos, Vegas, and 55-mph speed limit of the ’70s. Yates the provocateur protested by starting the Cannonball Run.

To me, a car-obsessed adolescent born five years after Nader’s famous book, Yates’s diatribes and stunts were gospel. When I finally got around to actually reading Nader’s book in the 1990s, however, the car companies had long since engineered around the regulations. Horsepower was back and climbing. The death rate had fallen from 5.3 deaths per 100 million miles traveled in 1965 to 1.7 in 1995.

I was surprised to find that the Corvair was just one chapter of Unsafe at Any Speed and also that much of Nader’s outrage made some sense. He wrote about dashboards freckled with sharp knobs, smog-choking Los Angeles, and the wisdom of seatbelts. While I vehemently endorse the checks and balances that healthy debate provides, Nader didn’t seem the crazed zealot I’d read about. Perhaps my softer stance is simply because I wasn’t around to watch the muscle car get neutered.

Yet I still wondered about the Corvair. Let’s forget about the controversy for a moment and consider the machine.

Gestated when General Motors was the undisputed king of carmakers, with over 50 percent of the U.S. car market, the Corvair was GM’s attempt to anticipate the future. It was a compact car but cleverly engineered to maintain interior space thanks to an air-cooled flat-six engine in the rear. In short, the 1960 Corvair was a complete rethink of the automobile and three years ahead of the Porsche 911.

GM bet big on the car with a whole family of body styles, including a sedan, a fetching coupe, convertible, wagon, van, and pickup. If Elon Musk had been behind it, he would have been called a genius. Today, these innovative and interesting cars are classic-car bargains, with solid, driver-quality examples available for 20 grand or less.

The Corvair was a revelation when compared to the lumbering oafs of the day. But its Achilles’ heel was that rear suspension, which was designed with economy in mind and was similar to the setup on the VW Beetle. A pair of short halfshafts connected the wheels to the frame-mounted differential. Only the inboard ends of the shafts could articulate, so as the suspension compressed or extended, the wheels tilted at extreme angles. This had the effect of dramatically reducing the rubber on the road. In an aggressive turn, the rear end tended to lose traction before the front, causing oversteer, or fishtailing.

That wasn’t all, however. There was a chance, a slim one, that the outside rear wheel could tuck in under the body and potentially trip the car into a rollover. These effects were further exasperated when owners failed to heed the Corvair’s unconventional recommended tire pressures: 15 psi in the front and 26 psi in the rear.

As I drive around the runway, gingerly at first to get a feel for the car, I’m shocked at how small and agile it feels. There’s no power steering yet the wheel doesn’t require much more effort than a modern car, even at parking-lot speeds. The same goes for the brakes. The suspension is soft, but compared to my 1955 Ford Country Squire, the oldest car in my fleet, the Corvair is a Ferrari. It’s fun.

In addition to Koehler, retired Chevrolet engineer Jim Musser is on hand. Musser spent his career in the research and development department. He worked on improving the Corvair and also prepared the defense for the court cases. He eventually succeeded Frank Winchell as the head of R&D. I gut-checked my plan with him, and he replied that race drivers of the day actually liked the Corvair. To make sure my test Corvair was as representative as possible, Coker Tire supplied a set of bias-ply tires, just like the car had in 1960.

I pick up speed and simulate a slalom course, driving back and forth across the center line. The harder I turn the more the back end feels light. Increasing the speed only exacerbates the effect, to the point where the back end clearly wants to make the turn faster than the front. To avoid spinning the car, I have to counter-steer almost immediately after initiating the turn. To racers, this behavior is known as “loose,” and it’s generally preferred to a front end that simply understeers, or plows. But I could see how the lightly trained driver might get into trouble.

That was Nader’s point: The average driver wasn’t equipped to handle an over-steering car. Since a slalom isn’t very representative of normal driving, I navigate a course of varying turns, from simple right-angle bends to longer sweepers. At moderate speeds, everything’s fine. When I go fast enough to overcome the traction of the tires, however, the back end does its thing. On those skinny 1960s-era tires, speed is a relative term. Arcing through a corner at a velocity any modern car would scoff at, the Corvair starts to slide. The manual steering is slow by today’s standards so catching the thing requires huge movements of the wheel. The Corvair is a drift machine.

There’s a critical point to make here about oversteer that deserves mention. Bad oversteering cars snap out the rear end without warning. There’s no transition between equilibrium and chaos. I’ve raced cars with poorly set-up suspensions that had buckets of snap oversteer, and every one was a horror show. The Corvair’s behavior, however, is gradual. There’s ample warning of the rear-end movement and plenty of time to catch it. I gleefully slide the thing, hamming it up for the photographer, who stops me after I pass.

“How is that outside tire not buckling under the car?” he asks.

Through his camera’s viewfinder he points out extreme angles of the rear suspension. The inside rear wheel had lifted off the ground and the outside wheel was riding on the sidewall. We have a look at the rear tires and there are scuff marks right up to the whitewall, yet the tread of the tires looks pristine. Odd. We shrug it off and I do a few more passes. Only the engine’s lack of horsepower keeps me from hanging the rear end out continuously. I discover I can do U-turns simply by lifting off the gas and cranking over the steering wheel. The Corvair pivots around in not much more than the width of one lane. I could do this all day.

Real life, however, is never as ideal as a trained driver on a closed course in a perfectly prepared car. Let’s imagine someone misjudges a turn and enters it too fast. Perhaps this person hasn’t correctly maintained the tire pressures. Then what? I’d wager that the car’s going to spin. Is that worse than the alternative? Say another driver does the same thing in a 1960 Chevy Impala. The Impala probably wouldn’t spin but instead just simply not make the turn at all.

Since every situation is unique, it’s impossible to say which outcome is preferable. Between the two, however, the more agile Corvair probably has the better chance of avoiding that ball that rolled into the street.

In 1971, the U.S. Department of Transportation tested the original Corvair alongside competitive cars and determined that it was not especially dangerous. By then the Corvair had been out of production for two years and the affair was mostly over. And it had not been pretty. In addition to the rash of product liability lawsuits, Nader successfully sued GM for invasion of privacy in 1966, after the company had him followed. This had the effect of further publicizing Unsafe at Any Speed.

The pity of it all is the black eye on what was and is an interesting car. To me—and undoubtedly to Corvair enthusiasts—the history is part of the appeal. Every conversation with Musser or Koehler yielded another interesting layer.

Here’s one: In 1962, during the first Corvair lawsuit—three years before Nader’s book—two of history’s most accomplished racing drivers, Sir Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio, took the stand to defend the car. Another: The Corvair helped cement the relationship between Chevrolet and Jim Hall, the Texas builder of the Chaparral Can-Am cars. How? Musser rented Hall’s racetrack to gather the data needed to defend the lawsuits. Those tests, by the way, advanced the industry’s knowledge of vehicle dynamics.

The curious thing is that by the time Nader’s book came out, Chevrolet had already evolved the Corvair with a second generation that featured a redesigned rear suspension. By then, however, the writing about the car’s fate was already on the wall, independent of Nader’s book. There was also the Mustang, which probably had more to do with the Corvair’s demise. The stylish and sporty sales monster was cheap to produce, especially when compared to the Corvair and its costly aluminum engine. The irony of the Corvair, says Musser, is that GM kept the Corvair around for longer than it otherwise would have, just to avoid the appearance of being influenced by a young lawyer.

As for my experience behind the wheel? I’m shopping.

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