this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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no 'one thing' will 'save' us. not even transit.
better to have vehicle options that don't spew carbon monoxide
Modern cars already don't spew carbon monoxide... Modern catalytic converter deal with that.
bzzt wrong. they deal with a portion of it, for the life of the catalyst in the converter. and a ton of other greenhouse gases.
but thanks for playing.....
I literally was CA SMOG trained. The catalytic converter should last the lifetime of the vehicle, it is a CATALYST after all, and the amount of CO coming out of a healthy cars tailpipe should be pretty small, around .1% to .5%. There are actually lots of cases where people failed to kill themselves because auto exhaust just isn't THAT acutely toxic anymore.
EDIT: I double checked my old memory, my memory switched 1/1000 with PPM for CO readings on gas analyzers, so it's significantly more than I remembered, but still significantly less than "spewing"
In case it was unclear, don't breathe car tailpipes, it's obviously still very bad for you
CA SMOG Trained - then you know a cat only removed @90% of that CO. for it's 10-15 year usable life.
life of the vehicle? guess that depends on how long you expect your vehicle to last. I have a 20 year old honda, expect to get 10 more years out of it. and that all is positing the cat's been treated decently, but you know (I mean, fuck, you're CA SMOG TRAINED! WOOHOO) or should know that excessive heat can seriously reduce the lifetime of the catalyst components.
why the fuck is this a conversation? assuming cat's clean 100% of the emissions is wrong, and you know it's wrong. pfft
how the fuck are you "CA SMOG TRAINED" and don't understand catalysts have a limited life, they're not eternal, fuck me....
Almost always when a catalytic converter dies it is because there's something wrong with the car that damaged the cat. I never actually worked in a smog shop so I can't give meaningful numbers but we had plenty of 20-30 year old test cars come through the school shop with original catalytic converters that still worked fine. And I was not claiming that no CO comes out of the tailpipe of modern cars, just not enough to be a meaningful issue, it's not a particularly persistent environmental gas outside of confined spaces. It's not a major smog component, it's just toxic if it's allowed to build up, and most modern cars aren't putting out enough of it for it to build up to dangerous levels without REALLY trying.