Exactly right ! Unfortunately, Kalifornia is far from a no-jackass zone. The Harley beards have been getting away with open exhaust waaay too long IMO. The Mustakes seem to be pretty loud too. There's a chucklehead down the street from me that has a '18 Silverado that's louder than my Dart with a 1/3 of the motor in it. Just blatant.
It's fun see a new breed of car guys getting involved, but they're not as careful as us old folk were at their age. The envelope has been pushed, and that's all the excuse the cali lib's need to rain on our parade.
Whine and moan about all the loud Harley’s, Mustangs, your neighbors, the tuner kids- everybody but you of course. And then blame the “libs” for passing a law to address a problem that you’ve been complaining about for years, because now you’re worried it might affect you. Can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either stop complaining about everyone else's loud exhaust or don't be surprised when you have comply with a new law too.
Love the YouTube clip as “evidence”. Everything on the internet must be true right? Except that's clearly a fake traffic stop, and they got the law wrong to boot. Just some BS to drum up support for that guys webpage.
SEMA has an article that actually explains the change. It also has links explaining the law and some of the testing.
As for the $1,000 fine? Also exaggerated. Yes, it can be that much. But, "According to the Judicial Council of California’s Uniform Bail and Penalty Schedules for 2019, the suggested base fine/fee for a first conviction is $25 with a total fee of $193." That's a long way from $1k.
Complain if you want, but at least get your facts straight first.
Meaning, a loud exhaust won't get you in front of the referee, yes, that's what they're called. I'd never heard of that until today. If they can drag you in front of the referee, why won't it cost the same $1000 ?
I think this will play out pretty quickly, I hope.
It's pretty hard to argue against this, when the cause, so they say, is because of the youngsters doing fast and furious type stuff by shutting down intersections doing doughnuts, street racing and the fatalities because of it.
Their goal is to not only get the loud exhaust off the street, but to also get the owners for any other mods that aren't legal.
I don't know how this is going to play out, time will tell.
Until then, any recommendations to a set of mufflers with good sound that won't get the PO POs attention?
The pre-76 cars are not exempt from the exhaust noise law. They weren’t before, they aren't now.
Because of that, they won’t be exempt from the fine. But, they are exempt from smog. You will still have to go to a referee for the sound test to verify that your exhaust is noise compliant to demonstrate you fixed the car, but that's it.
The testing protocol is kind of hard to come by, but it's supposed to be conducted at 3/4 of the max rated engine speed at a steady state. So, if your engine had a max RPM of 6k rpm, the test would be conducted at 4k rpm. Not WOT, and not revving the engine, but a constant 4k. And that would have to be the factory max rated engine speed, not necessarily what your engine can spin now. The rest of the details of the test are hard to get, SAE sells the procedure documents for like 80 bucks and only certain BAR stations have it. There will be specified distances for the meter from the tail pipe, how long the test has to be, what meter to use and how it has to be calibrated, etc.
There are tons of articles out there that give decibel ratings for different mufflers. Problem is none of them are tested to the SAE spec, so, really not that helpful. The dB rating at the tail pipe and 30 ft away from the tail pipe will be very different. Best advice is to have a full exhaust system that goes all the way out to the back of the car and use something other than race bullets for mufflers. And try not to be a jackass and get pulled over for something else, because unless you're making people's ears bleed this is probably going to be a ticket that gets tacked on top of the offense that you were pulled over for. Ie, you were speeding, got pulled over, and got tagged with an excessive noise ticket on top of that.
