Well, hmmmm. At the risk of taking this further into the political zone, I'll dive in again. I left California in the Eighties, before it became fashionable to do so. I left for a better job, and partly because my wife had been held up at gunpoint in one of the better parts of our then home town and in part because my line of work had made me a target for wholesalers providing stock for undocumented pharmacists.
I was a member of a car pool in California in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two days before the Iranians stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, I bought a new Mazda GLC. (That was a great car, and I drove it for 16 years. ) While the car still had its temporary license plate, my wife hadn't gotten around to scraping off the assembly line smog test sticker from the passenger window. My colleague was reading the morning newspaper as I drove. As he read the prior day's air pollution report, he noted that the air coming out the tailpipe of my new car was cleaner than the air it was sucking in, at least for the city we worked in. Four years later, California finally got around to biennial testing for that kind of car. (Not that there were a lot of mods for a 1400 cc Mazda 4 cylinder!)
I ended up in a place with a rigid smog urban inspection system that really works. It's fast and fair, so long as the modifications to our vehicles aren't extreme. I've had to test my turbodiesel every year since I bought it. I don't view this is as an imposition on my life. Maybe it's just me.
I also used to drive a 1983 Jeep Wagoneer LTD, which became known as a Grand Wagoneer the following year. I towed a 19 foot travel trailer with it, and it was a nightmare. So in 1994, I replaced the 2 barrel carburetor with an OEM 4 barrel Motorcraft 4350 carburetor and AMC intake from a 1977 California Matador. (This back-usage of equipment is widely considered to be wrong. ) Then I cut off the OEM bead style catalytic converter (autocat) and replaced it with a much smaller $69 updated honeycomb autocat. Then I cut off the OEM muffler and replaced it with a so-called turbo muffler. It put out way more felt power and got better mileage if I could just keep my foot out of the immense secondary venturis. (But it was sooo much fun. )
With trepidation, I took it in for its first annual smog inspection. It was an IM-240 inspection, which required driving it on a dyno tester. I finished the test, and the technician had a very bewildered look on his face as he told me to drive forward and just wait. He summoned a supervisor over. He and the supervisor looked at my door sticker, and the VIN on the dashboard. They did this three times. Then the supervisor went and got another supervisor, and they repeated that inspection, looked under the hood again, and again checked the underside with the mirror on wheels. Finally, the tech and the first supervisor walked back to me, and the supervisor asked, "This is a 1983, right?" "Yes," I replied. "I don't know how you did it, but your Jeep meets the 1993 requirements. "
Two years later, I traded it for my truck. Which at least easily meets 1996 requirements, and I spend less than two hours a year doing it.
Oh, yeah, and one of my worst nightmares is to be transferred back to California. But the nightmare is for reasons other than smog tests. And that discussion truly belongs in the Political section.
Attention: TDR Forum Junkies 
