Why don't you just fix the beater?

Mike
86/00 CJ7 Laredo, 33x9.5 BFG Muds, 'glass nose to tail in '00
88 Cherokee 235 BFG AT's
Canadian Off Road Trips Photos:  Non members can still view!
Jan/06 http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2115147590
(More Off Road album links at bottom of the view page)

If your looking for the law that shows you that it is illegal to tamper
with the vehicle to evade an emissions test or that taking it to a
different part of the state to get it inspected and evade the emissions
test they are all on the Texas DOT site. The Federal statutes pertaining
to emissions tampering are covered in the Clean air act.

Another thing is that they use the address of registration to determine
the type of inspection needed. That gets punched into the computer and
it tells them what testing needs to be done.

I know emission laws have changed a lot since 1997, but from 1987 to
1997 I lived in Texas. My first five years I lived in Dallas County and
the next five years I lived in Collin county, just north of Dallas
County. (Bear with this snoozer of a story. There is a point to all of
it) Anyway, emission sniffing was a joke at that time. Dallas county
required it. Collin county required just a regular safety inspection
every year and NOT the emission test. One thing I remember is that when
your month was due for inspection the state would give you another 10
days before you got fined, so (being the tightwad that I was) I would
always wait a few days after your inspection sticker was void and then
I would have the car tested a few days into the next month. That way
you would always get 13 months on your 12 month inspection sticker. Has
that changed?  ;-)    In my ten years there, I got an extra 10 months
free.
When I moved to Collin county, I took my car in on a Saturday to have
it inspected. My car was about 6th or 7th in line and I decided to wait
to have it done. There was a 16 year old kid doing inspections that day
and he was taking about 5 minutes per car. There was a big glass window
between the waiting room and the inspection shop, so I watched him do a
couple of inspections. He was driving the car in, taking a razor and
scraping the old sticker off and applying a new one. I kid you not.
His "inspection" was simply taking off and putting on a new sticker.
And I paid $20 bucks for that.......
Also, some populated counties were exempt from emission testing. If I
recall right, El Paso was exempt from emission testing because they
claimed all their pollution was drifting across the border from Mexico.
Okay.....
Then, in ~'96 or'97, the state was implementing centralized emission
testing stations. The company building these was granted a
multi-million dollar contract to build and run all of these. Too many
people complained that they were too far away, had too take off work
for the car inspection, etc., etc., and Texas dropped the centralized
testing. The company that was awarded the contract sued the state and
won and Texas had to pay them millions.
Okay, I know a lot has changed in ten years and I'm sure it has been
for the bettter. I just thought I'd tell a few of the stories that I
remembered.