It has long been a mystery why new or nearly new automobiles should be subject to the same emissions testing that is conducted on much older vehicles.
With few exceptions, newer vehicles are far cleaner, environmentally speaking, in that they put out far lower levels of pollutants than older cars and trucks. So forcing the owners of new cars to go through costly emissions tests every so often is really little more than an unnecessary tax.
The city of Memphis appears to have recognized that fact. It has started exempting from its emissions testing cars from the 2008 model year or later.
Why? It’s simple math.
In a review of testing records from 2008, not even one-tenth of 1 percent of newer vehicles in Memphis failed the annual tests. In other words, tens of thousands of vehicle owners were being forced to spend lots of time and money on tests that virtually never found a pollution problem with the vehicles.