This story, about men (because it's always men who do this shit) who fuck with the emissions controls on diesel pickup trucks to "roll coal" (because it's always assholes with pickup trucks) reminded me of a past event.
I try to get some exercise by walking, if the weather permits. So one day, I'm walking along a street, when about a hundred feet ahead, at an intersection, a big dually pickup truck pulled up the the stop sign on the cross street. The truck turned right, so it was coming my way. The driver made eye-contact, then he mashed down on the gas, causing a huge plume of smoke to come out of the truck's exhaust pipes (which were horizontal under the truck bed). When I say "huge plume of smoke", I've seen steam locomotives fighting a grade that emitted less smoke.
I was able to draw a quick breath and hold it before the cloud of smoke being emitted by asswipe's truck enveloped me.
Grr.
If I had my phone with me, I would have taken a picture and seen if I could have had the asswipe busted for assault.
At other times, assholes in pickup trucks have seemed to think it's funny to come onto the shoulder and see how close they can come to whacking me with their mirrors.
So when I see a full-size pickup, like a Dodge Ram or a F-250, my operating assumption is that the driver, if it's a guy, is an asshole until proven otherwise.
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There's good reason to get rid of the soot filter on these pickups, which is always clogging up and killing your truck. This can result in slight amounts of visible black smoke under certain conditions. But to make it "roll coal", you have to have the diesel injectors then inject vastly more diesel into the cylinders than is needed for combustion. This not only puts out a big plume of black smoke, it also dilutes your oil and causes excess wear in your engine due to cylinder wash. These people are so intent upon being assholes that they destroy their own engines just for the pleasure of being assholes!
It's all about spite, in the end - these assholes hate themselves, so they want to make everybody else's life even more miserable than their own. Which is why they vote for Republican politicians who promise to punish "The Blacks" even more than they punish "The Whites". SIGH.
I don't have a diesel truck, but I usually think voting for the Democrat is worse.
Anyway, sometimes the truck boys pull the shoulder crap on bicyclists. Sometimes they get caught.
To those who say the diesel pollution controls hurt performance and mileage, I point them here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCB_Dieselmax
It burned only a gallon of fuel on the record run with all the pollution controls in place, just to be a badass.
And unless they're filled with a tree-planting crew on a mountain, you can also assume that FUV drivers are assholes. Exactly what sport is played in a 'Sport Utility Vehicle'?
Well, plus side of living in a large metro area, very few black-cloud blowing trunks. It's not that we don't have full-sized trucks piloted by assholes, cause we sure do. It's that they can't do it with the cops all over!
J4rh34d, the issue with the diesel pollution controls is that unless you run it like a big rig or like a car trying for a fuel economy record - thousands of miles and hours at a time -- you're going to have to regen the DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) or else it'll clog. Regening the DPF requires extra fuel to be injected into the exhaust in order to heat up the DPF so the captured soot can burn off. If you don't do that, or you interrupt the regen cycle because you're doing a lot of short trips, the DPF will clog -- which, BTW, is the number one reliability issue with diesels in the United States right now. Even big rigs have had DPF issues when they're being used for short trips within a city, and construction equipment operators curse the emissions controls with a passion, because they're always getting clogged due to the way construction equipment duty cycles work.
So yes, you are correct that the modern diesel emissions controls don't affect performance, and, if you're doing long hauls that give the DPF time to burn off any particulates that gather in it, they don't affect fuel economy either. But there are definite maintenance and reliability issues being caused by the particulate filters required here in the United States that have yet to be adequately resolved. This is one reason why, despite the stellar fuel economy, I have not been tempted to buy a diesel-powered auto or truck here in the United States. The reliability issues caused by the emission controls, specifically, the particulate filters, are just too pervasive right now for me to consider it a reasonable option.
I love Bruce Cockburn, and Rocket Launcher is maybe my favorite song of his. Having a little over a million miles in service driving a delivery truck, my take is that the regular exhaust is bad enough, you really don't need to make it any worse.
-Doug in Oakland
So when I see a full-size pickup, like a Dodge Ram or a F-250, my operating assumption is that the driver, if it's a guy, is an asshole until proven otherwise.
Where I live, every super-sized-truck is driven by a guy who 1) thinks he can speed like he's driving a race car even though he's in something the size of a Sherman tank, 2) has twenty stickers on his back window proclaiming Obama's an alien Muslim terrorist eating babies, 3) flying the Confederate Battle Flag as though the surrender at Appomattox Court House never happened.
So, yeah. Assholes.
Tod, other than the usual clueless-yakking-on-cell-phones driving that everyone driving on four-wheels (or more) engages in nowadays, I have no beef with SUV drivers. Other than they can't fucking park.
Most assuredly, the drivers of those rigs are Trump supporters.
As the driver of of a 1993 f250 powered by a Cummins 4bt (23 mpg mixed driving), I can assure you that we're not ALL assholes. Coal rollers are not treated gently on the 4bt bbs (4btswaps.com). We do conversions for reliability & economy, these jerks buy their overpriced trucks and the pay extra to have the ecu modified to overfuel. So yeah, assholes
I recently bought an SUV. The sport is fencing, and I'm carrying masks, jackets, and foils for a couple of dozen students. I used to do the job with an old Buick LeSabre; the Outback makes life much easier.
I have a backup camera with a reticle on it, so I can position myself precisely in the center of the painted lines in the parking lot. And, being me, I spend 1 or 2 minutes doing that, to everyone's annoyance.
Joe, a Subaru Outback is not an SUV, despite Subaru's advertising to that effect. It is a station wagon, sold as such (the Subaru Legacy) everywhere except here in the United States, where it's put on its tippy-toes, given some cladding, and sold as an SUV because Americans don't buy station wagons (SIGH!).
Which reminds me of the full-size Buick station wagon that we had at some point in my childhood. Need some plywood and 2x4's from the Home Depot? Flop down the back seat, and no problem! The last time Buick had a station wagon, in the early 1990's, it got better gas mileage than a minivan or pickup truck, yet for the vast majority of even handy types who needed to haul occasional plywood and drywall was just as practical (as long as you weren't trying to haul more than five people, of course). But Americans don't buy station wagons...
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