I grew up in the Bay Area and watched when Emission Controls first made thier appearance.
FWIW, I remember that era - when I was a really small kid (late '70s / early '80s) we were living in L.A.
The air was so bad that some days it just was not fit to breathe. Especially in SoCal.
Agreed; I can remember days where we weren't allowed out on the playground because the air quality was so poor. Having said that:
As difficult as CARB is to deal with, they started the emission requirements that we all love today. We should be glad of it.
While I won't knock cleaner air, the reality is that there was already a Federal mandate for emissions control devices dating back to (IIRC) 1968. The Federal requirements were never intended to be set in stone, but rather to improve over time. Had CARB not existed (or kept their hands out of automotive emissions), the air quality would have improved anyway as technology and the Federal requirements progressed - not to mention as older, more-polluting vehicles went out of service and were replaced with newer, cleaner-running models.
IMHO, CARB should have stuck to addressing non-automotive sources of air pollution. I won't argue that what they were trying to achieve with automotive regulations was essentially a good thing, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions; if you want someone to thank for the lack of midsized diesel engines in light trucks and 4x4s, thank CARB. They made it so bloody difficult to certify a diesel for passenger-vehicle use in California that it was unattractive for manufacturers to try to meet their ever-changing standards - and if you can't sell a car in California (itself the nation's largest new-car market) or any of the other CARB states, you'll never make your money back on it. The CRD KJ is a good example of this, as are the TDi VW Touaregs.
Go overseas to, say, India and try to breathe that air.
I've been to India. I've also been to Mexico City. I'll take Calcutta or New Delhi over the DF any day of the week for air quality, and that's without ever having had the China experience which I understand to be even worse. From what I can tell, India is at least making an effort; China and Mexico appear to be largely trying to ignore the problem and hope that nobody notices. This isn't to say that any of the above are necessarily good in this regard, but what's happening outside of the context of the US isn't necessarily applicable to situations here (or even in Europe, the next-nearest reasonable comparison).
The bit about only having to make the year specific requirements is actually Federal. All the States practice it.
Yes, but it's also a practice that (to the best of my knowledege) is codified in most States' respective legislation covering automotive emissions.
Emission Standards FORCED American manufacturers to go to EFI.
Agreed, and it also forced the foreign manufacturers to do the same. In that sense it was a good thing. However:
Europe had it for decades.
Be careful with this statement.
I grew up - and reached driving age - in Europe. Ireland, specifically. Europe-wide, fuel injection was a typically-expensive option on virtually all cars up until about the mid-'90s, and usually reserved for the performance models within a range. The most common way to get fuel injection as standard in Europe up to that point? Buy a diesel.
The other thing is that there were no common Europe-wide emissions standards until about 1993-1995. Austria was selling unleaded fuel
without requiring catalytic converters in about 1987, but leaded was the norm just about everywhere right up into the early '90s. You could even buy leaded petrol fairly widely (though it was being phased out) up until the middle of the last decade. Until I moved to California in 1998, I'd never owned a vehicle with any kind of emissions control on it. I'd had injected vehicles, but those were mostly bought and sold on for beer money when I was in college.
Bear in mind also that the ex-Eastern Bloc countries admitted to the EU are still in a catch-up phase on all of this. They've gotten
much better in this regard, but it was still possible to buy a carburetted vehicle new in some of these countries until a few years ago. I'm not sure what the current state of play with them is, but the overall point is this: it took Europe 20 years to catch up to where the US was in 1975. Granted, there was the benefit of having 20 years' improvement in emissions control technology to start with, but that didn't stop Dublin having the a surprisingly-similar smog problem to c.1980 Los Angeles right up to about 10 years ago - though an argument could be made that both cities' geographic layouts is also a largely-contributing factor.
