Here in Colorado any car made before 1981 needs a yearly emissions test, otherwise anything over seven model-years old needs to have a bi-yearly emissions test done on it – and they generally remind you of this when it’s time to renew your tags.
Well, today my renewal notice came in the mail with the red “EMISSIONS TEST IS REQUIRED” printed on it, so I left work about 15 minutes early and ran down to Parker to get the car tested.
The reason for going down to Parker is that, as previously mentioned, Parker is the last bastion of Colorado’s car culture – so the emissions shop down there is well versed in vehicular insanity… Like, they didn’t bat an eye at my aftermarket work on the car – the EGR system is clearly still plumbed correctly and functioning properly even though the makeup air now comes from a hole in a carbon fiber intake and the return into the engine runs through a catch can. The aftermarket throttle body is pretty obvious as well, but they know that as long as the car isn’t throwing codes, it’s okay.
If I did the emissions closer to home in Aurora, they would get as far as what’s under the hood not matching the picture on the monitor, and then interrogate me for the CARB EO stickers I don’t have.
Anyway, I arrived at about 14:30 – well before the typical afterwork rush – and just as I pulled up one of the techs came out and hung up a “Temporarily Closed” sign.
It was 95 degrees in the shade of the tree I was under, and the guy in the ‘vette was sitting under the blazing sun with his t-tops off… I assumed he was going to die…
About 15 minutes goes by when one of the techs wanders over and that’s when I find out that they’d had a power outage that was just long enough to require a 60-minute warmup on all of the equipment again.
But, being as the guy in the ‘vette and I are over 500 horses, they can’t put us on the dyno and it’s just an ODB scan – so we went ahead and got scanned while the lesser cars waited for the spectrometer to warm up. 🙂
The Hellcat passed the inspection and the scan with flying colors, but failed on the gas cap test…
So I drove across the street to the AutoZone, dropped $17 on an aftermarket gas cap, got back in line – and 15 minutes later I’m good for another two years.
One other thing that happened this year is the renewal is for 2027 – which makes the car ten years old now – and at ten years Colorado assumes they’ve milked you for all the money they can get. So even with my $25 custom black and white plates, the total to register the car was $96.
Which is a far cry from the ~$300 it cost last year.
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