E-Check, it’s finally over.

What a waste that was.

For 10 years now we’ve had to take our cars to the e-check place, give up $20 (or more if you failed and got to do it again).

For us, we’ve had at most 4 vehicles at some times, that’s an extra $80 ever two years. All of them in good working order. Better than a good portion of the vehicles around the area where we live. Yet E-Check doesn’t seem to keep them off the road.

Why is that?

Our former 1991 Nissan pickup probably shouldn’t have ever passed, but it did with surprisingly low numbers every time. The guys would just look at the test results with amazement every time. Who was I to argue? On the other hand I’d been forced to fix our van on more than one occasion simply because the tail pipe had rusted out.

Good riddance E-Check. Yet another bureaucratic mess created to solve a problem that didn’t really exist in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt there is a smog problem at times, but I don’t think you can pin it on cars of a certain range, then exclude ‘vintage auto’s’, and exempt trucks over a certain weight, and cars that simply can’t be made to pass.  That’s right, you can fail 3 times, show a good faith effort in getting your car to pass and you’re good to go.  All you had to do was fail 3 times and have receipts for work done.  It was all a tax to begin with.

That doesn’t solve the problem.  You can’t convince me that the big diesel trucks chugging out big plumes of black smoke aren’t the ones contributing to the smog and I’ve yet to see someone pulled over who’s burning transmission fluid and leaving a cloud behind them.  Take care of the true issues and leave us common folk alone.

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