Emissions testing in NY has been gone for quite a while on these cars.
The chassis dynos are basically gone and the only cars that get tested are ones that the cars computer can be plugged into and downloaded into the State computer.
That starts at about the 98 model year. Everything before that all the inspector is required to do is walk around it and look at it. The car doesn't even have to be run or the lights don't even need to be turned on to see if they work.
Under the old system with the chassis dyno, these cars would never pass.
You can not get them clean enough without an air pump and a cat. Doesn't matter that they were exempt from the manufacturer needing to include them on the car, they would still need to be clean enough without them, and that's ALMOST impossible. The numbers kept getting lower and lower every year.
What changed the system ultimately was that the NYS inspections are by private independent owners.
The dyno was constantly breaking down on them and then finally when the newer version of the car CPU came out that was downloadable, it became a practicality thing. It became impractical to maintain the dyno also for only a few old nuts like me who still drove antiques.
The dyno needed to be maintained monthly at a cost of about $3000 a month. The independent owners lobby here is a strong one. They just lobbied against the system and ultimately won out.
The air is still clean here and the only vehicle emissions that is questionable here are the diesels. Then you have the independent truckers lobby and don't screw with them.
It is just very recently that some of the German manufacturers (this year) like VW are advertising new clean diesels. That will take a while to get into the trucking industry but ultimately will.
The other polluters were the "public buses". Now they are all electric. We still have the diesel train locomotives but I suspect for political reasons the railroads will eventually switch over to "clean" diesels?
Ironically the Cleveland actually runs with less emissions with the Webers than a single Holley. It's quite noticeable.
It was also relatively easy to prepare the car for the exhaust pipe test with the Webers. I just needed to switch the idle jets over to 60's.
That also lowers the idle rpm which had to be kept under 950rpm as I recall otherwise the machine automatically would not test the engine.
At times, that was the most difficult thing to do, AND the ignition advance HAD TO BE reduced to about ZERO degrees.
Depending on the weather, that was difficult to keep the engine running long enough to test it.
It had to be running about 20 minutes with this set up to clean out the NOX in the exhausts.
The NOX with the headers is up a little tough though to get right.
Typically as you lower the hydrocarbons the NOX rises. You have to get the balance of all of these factors just right.
That involves quiet bit of time.
UNTIL they put video recorders on the test, the simple solution was to run another car on the machine that you know was clean enough.
The State figured that one out and changed the requirements and needed video documentation with a picture of the license plate as well.
Of course in NYS this always was just for the lower 5 counties which included NYC. The rest of the state was free to pollute as they wanted to.
Here in NY for the Pantera though, that's all just "water under the bridge".
