Jay Leno’s star power wasn’t enough to persuade a California legislative committee to pass a measure to allow owners of classic cars like him to be exempted from the state’s rigorous smog-check requirements.
Imagine being rich and famous and this is your political cause. What an effing creep.
The problem is that California has a lot of these cars, and they are daily driven. The solution, which will be expensive, is to run the cars on ethanol.
At least in MN the way it works is that vehicles over a certain age can be registered as collectors vehicles and get special lifetime collectors plates. If you register a vehicle as a collectors vehicle then it doesn’t need any updated emissions or safety equipment. But at the same time it is illegal to use a collectors vehicle for daily driving. You are only permitted to drive it to/from shows/events and to take it on occasional pleasure drives. If you get caught making a grocery run with one then you get fined, the plates impounded, and you could even face jail time.
This seems to work out pretty well here. It’s pretty uncommon to see these vehicles on the road outside of big events. And it doesn’t require owners to modify their classic vehicles when many pride themselves on keeping these vehicles as stock as possible.
Edit: Also ethanol isca very bad idea for these vehicles. Firstly the seals and hoses on these vehicles are not designed for it so it destroys them, as someone else aluded to. But more importantly, these vehicles aren’t being driven regularly and ethanol is not stable to leave in the vehicles. When it ages ethanol breaks down into a varnish that covers everything and clogs the hell out of things like carburators. That is the reason that you want to use nonoxygenated gas (no ethanol added) on vehicles that aren’t driven frequently. Ethanol is the main thing that makes gas go bad. If you don’t have ethanol in there then the shelf life is extended dramatically. If you ran these vehicles on ethanol you would basically be requiring people to drain and dry every fuel carrying component whenever they wanted to store it (which should be often if you don’t want them daily driving them).
In Minnesota, we don’t have smog checks or inspections. Furthermore, the registration tax for any vehicle 10 years or older is a fixed $30 no matter what the vehicle is actually worth. So if you have a old collector car, getting collector plates for it saves you like $25 a year versus just getting normal plates for it. So it’s not uncommon at all to see collector cars running around with standard MN plates, since the added cost is minimal and you don’t have to deal with the restrictions.
My state just restricts their use during January. You also cannot use the vehicle for any type of commercial purpose. You must also have at least one vehicle that isn’t register as a collector.
Doesn’t that also wear the engine out more quickly?
Engines don’t necessarily wear faster, but there are modifications such as rubber seals, more robust fuel lines, and new air/fuel mapping to accommodate running ethenol vs gas.