For everyone’s reference, back in January YouTuber Doug DeMuro reviewed the Elantra N. Here’s his review cued up to the part where he demonstrates the different exhaust sounds:
I forgot about how configurable it is. It has more than just generic eco/normal/sport/track modes like many performance cars have. You can actually create a custom mode, and one of the things you can configure is the exhaust sound.
He can buy a different Elantra N tomorrow, register it and drive it, and the state would be perfectly willing to go along with the plan. They probably wouldn’t even notice, and nobody from the state would have any recourse to deny him his car even if they did.
It’s just this particular car that the state is claiming requires repair, which it doesn’t. They aren’t claiming he’s a bad driver, they’re claiming that this particular car is unfit for the streets of California.
Edited to add, this guy is annoying, not a danger to everyone around him.
Nothing. He should have been given a ticket for excessive noise.
Yes, he would have had to change the settings from his touch screen. And the inspector who tested it would also have to change the settings. So what it comes down to is a catch-22 where the owner can’t certify it because there is a track mode setting.
According to the video he passed the smog test in the track mode setting but not the noise level.
As was pointed out above the car can exceed the speed limit yet the owner doesn’t have his registration pulled for speeding. They’re given a speeding ticket. Nothing needs to be re-certified.
If the situation is accurately presented and it continues to gain in public awareness then this will affect the city of Riverside and it’s police department negatively.
Conversely, if it continues to gain traction it may wake up the California government agency responsible for auto standards to start enforcing on the manufacturers that cars sold into the CA market must meet CA noise standards in all driver-selectable modes. Including hidden modes that can be selected with a tuner chip or similar tool. Telling e.g. Hyundai that they’ve sold their last new car in California until they clean up their act would be highly motivational.
CA single-handedly dragged the USA into having air pollution standards on cars when the Feds refused to act back in the 1970s. They could easily do the same thing with deliberately noisy cars in the 2020s.
Yeah. I don’t think this is going to spark as much outrage at the enforcement as you are expecting. I think Hyundai and the asshole driver who used that setting on the roads are going to get most of the blame.
What if it is legal in the other 49 states and DC?
Does California law require that the test be carried out in the “most aggressive” mode, or however you want to describe it? It certainly seems plausible to me that they would.
Does California also measure the noise level as a standard part of the smog test? Or was this just done specifically because he got a ticket for excessive noise? I’ve never really paid much attention to exactly what they were testing when I took my car for a smog check, but I’ve never owned a particularly noisy car, either.
If we followed that logic then literally all cars would fail because they are capable of speeding.
A Hyundai??? Really???
They can sell them there.
California has strict emission standards. If a car came with a “Non California Emissions” button right there on the dash, California should tell the Mfg that they can’t sell their car in California.
California does not have a maximum speed standard. If they did, such as “all cars must have a governor so as not to exceed 75mph” and Chevy gave their cars a “disable governor” setting, then yeah, California should bar those cars from being sold or operated.
If you follow almost any line of argument to its “logical conclusion” you end up in an illogical place.
You’re certainly logically correct. But that doesn’t mean we (i.e. society) have an obligation to actually go to that extreme. Nor does the existence of an extreme (in either direction) imply that any movement (in either direction) is per se wrong or evil.
I live in an area where deliberately loud cars, trucks, and motorcycles are commonplace, stylish even. Generally the owners’ attitude seems to be “Hey everybody! Look at meeee!” coupled with “I love vandalizing other people’s lives; I relish the warm selfish feeling it brings out in myself.”
As a former gearhead, I admire a nice engine note as much as the next guy. But when every green light triggers a roar from multiple vehciles heard a half-mile away across densly populated urban/suburban residential areas, that’s an awful lot of gratuitious noise pollution being spewed for scant benefit to the spewer and material total harm to the society as a whole.
Like textbooks, cars are made for all 50 states and DC. That’s why with so many tight emission standards and even states adopting California’s, all the car manufacturers just go with making it CA compliant. Car manufacturers will not make a second version for one state if all you have to do to make it legal is turn a dial. MAYBE make a software fix if California presses the issue.
Small correction – many automakers have made “California Emissions” packages, so in a sense they do make a 2nd version of their cars just for CA. Sometimes, at least. New cars that are sold in CA must meet CA emissions standards, whether by default or via the addition of such a package, and new car buyers are not allowed to leave the state to buy a non-CA certified version of the same vehicle just to bring it back into the state.
None of this, however, applies to used vehicles. So you can buy a “used” car with 300 miles that’s being sold as used that doesn’t meet CA emissions standards and bring it into CA no problem.
I can certainly see California making Hyundai remove the “race” mode from new N models sold in the state, or at least neutering the exhaust modes. But I don’t see how they can simply refuse to register such a car.
Not in the sense that he’s about to kill or immediately maim somebody, no.
But excessive noise does maim people. It destroys hearing. Even when it’s not loud enough to do so instantly, the cumulative damage can be considerable. He’s not likely to maim anybody all on his own; but enough people doing this over time will maim a lot of people, not all of whom volunteered for it.
(Excessive noise also significantly increases stress for many people, which also has health consequences, though they’re harder to pin down.)
It’s a design standard, not a design option. The point of the regulations is to ensure that cars sold abide by the standard, not to ensure it is theoretically possible for the cars to meet the standard. Hyundai is capable of abiding by California’s standards, and they should be held to that.
And even if it’s not maiming people, we absolutely pass laws about quality-of-life. Unless a poster is arguing that noise ordinances are unethical or unconstitutional or something, “he’s not a danger” would be a canard even if it were true.
Just trying to suggest that a chronic drunk driver, who requires an interlock to be allowed in a car, is a whole different class of problem than a guy whose car is too loud. The danger justifies a much more rigorous solution, like having to alter an otherwise functioning car.
Jerky McLoudcar shouldn’t be forced to make a multi-thousand dollar custom alteration to his new car because he selected Hyundai’s backfire special mode.
Yes, because there are many people in this country who would buy a car SPECIFICALLY for this setting (see: the “Rolling Coal” crowd).
Just to ground the discussion, California’s muffler laws are here: California Vehicle Code Section 27150
The laws basically say you can’t register a car with an exhaust that is too loud when tested according to the California Highway Patrol test procedures (Secs. 27150 and 27200) and that no person shall modify the exhaust system so as to make it louder and fail the test (Sec. 27151). The CHP is supposed to use test standards that take into account standards from the Society of Automotive Engineers, which is essentially a car manufacturer’s trade and standards group.
The driver seemingly violated Sec. 27151(a) by pushing a bunch of buttons on his car to make it excessively loud. This would be a violation of 27151(a) but for the carve-out in Sec. 27151(b). 27151(b) says an exhaust system complies with the law as long as it passes when tested in compliance with a particular SAE engineering standard (Standard J1169 May 1998). If you want to read that standard, you have to pay $74 to the Society of Automotive Engineers. My hunch is that the engineering standard permits Hyundai’s exhaust to have an unreasonably loud mode as long as it also has a default quiet mode.
The driver is saying that the car meets the California law because it’s stock and meets the quiet test when tested according to the engineering standard. The regulators are saying if you push the buttons, it’s too loud. Driver is responding that the engineering testing standard doesn’t allow the regulators to push the buttons they are pushing when they test it. Since I can’t read the standard to be sure, I can only guess who is right. I suspect that it’s the driver because I also suspect that Hyundai understands this law better than a cop on the street. Other manufacturers have selectable exhaust bypasses like Hyundai, including Corvette and Porsche and I suspect they too know what they are doing.
Me too. The cop didn’t just say it was too loud and issue a ticket. He made particular statements about what the driver’s remedy would be that suggests he had looked into this before the stop. I think he happens to be wrong in this case but it seems to show this was not the result of an impulsively issued ticket or completely uninformed judgment.
Yup.
I believe, if the car is stock, he has to choose to be an obnoxious asshole by picking Track mode every time he turns it on. It will default to a quieter mode when he restarts it.
As noted, every car can be operated illegally if the driver so chooses.
Oddly, California doesn’t seem to have a law that prohibits operating a car that generates excessive noise. They have a law that prohibits registering excessively loud cars but they seem to have (probably inadvertently) created a loophole big enough to drive an unmuffled truck carrying a Veloster N through.
As noted above, I can’t read the actual SAE standard but based on the summary, it requires testing in a “steady state” and I suspect it requires testing only in a default mode. This is the peril of allowing special interests to write the laws that will govern them.
The noise level was tested because he was cited in some fashion for excessive noise.
My hunch is that the car meets the standard but the standard did not actually require what California thought it did when they adopted it.
No, but he should probably get an excessive noise ticket for being a jackass. Unfortunately, he might not in this case.
Maybe not. But he should certainly be forced to quit using that mode unless he’s on a racetrack that’s got permits for that sort of noise level.
And if he won’t do that, then whatever penalty is necessary to make him quit doing it, up to and including confiscating the car (but not, say, drawing and quartering) seems to me to be fairly applicable.
If his claim is that he never uses the loud mode except on a properly-permitted racetrack, that would be different; but it doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in this case. A ticket might be appropriate for a first offence – but do we know that this is a first offence? (I haven’t watched the video, but I doubt that information’s available in a video of the traffic stop.)