MAX Update No. 77: MAX Gets Smogged

Reader Contribution by Staff
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There have been a few questions about MAX’s legality among the Comments on these updates. Now I don’t think of myself as a scofflaw, and I sure don’t think rules are meant to be broken, but I often let the reason for the rule guide my interpretation of the rule.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency, if you’re new here) has some very strong words regarding tampering with vehicles and their engines, and there are plenty of good reasons to prohibit tampering, regardless of the intent of the tamperer. However, there are some inconsistencies in enforcement; some are based on getting the most bang for the enforcement buck, and some appear to be the result of just plain good sense. I have had many conversations with EPA engineers and execs over these last few decades…

Well yeah, I was one of the home brewed alcohol fuel folks back when Mother Earth News was first spreading the word about alternative fuels, back in the late ’70s, and here’s a big surprise: the EPA did not recognize ethanol as a motor fuel back then. Everybody who was running ethanol blends back in The Day was violating the Clean Air Act; we were all a bunch of tamperers, violating the letter of a law that had gone into effect in 1963, when gasoline was 29 cents a gallon and we exported more gallons than we imported.

I expect every EPA official I talked with back then has retired, so if I may grossly paraphrase the off-the-record consensus of the era, it was: yeah, technically you’re in violation, but we have better things to do than throw the book at a handful of conservationists who are doing now what we’ll all be doing in the future, so keep up the good work and maybe we’ll all learn something.

Half a lifetime later, I’m playing canary-in-the-coal-mine again, with an unconventional car with an unconventional engine burning an unconventional fuel — straight vegetable oil. As with ethanol 30 years ago, the EPA does not recognize straight vegetable oil as a motor fuel today (And they only got around the legal problem of biodiesel fuel by redefining diesel fuel as petroleum or vegetable based. There’s not much sulfur in vegetable oil; that’s a plus.), yet people have been converting their diesel cars and trucks (and selling conversion kits, and writing books on how to do the conversion yourself) for years and I don’t think any of those people have been carted off in handcuffs.

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