California Air Resources Board

Pursuant to the requirements of Assembly Bill (AB) 2289, California’s Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR), in cooperation with California Air Resources Board (CARB), performs certain analyses of Smog Check or Inspection and Maintenance (I/M) related data and periodically reports the results of these analyses to the public. Specific requirements of the bill include estimation of excess emissions associated with vehicles initially passing a Smog Check that subsequently fails a Random Roadside (RR) Inspection and reasons for the failures.

EMFAC characterizes the emissions from the California fleet, which includes vehicles that both pass and fail Smog Check. Although some vehicles that are high-emitting and fail Smog Check are included in EMFAC, it cannot explicitly model the emissions from vehicles failing Smog Check or calculate the emissions benefits of the Smog Check Program. This test program, in collaboration with BAR, will procure failing vehicles from BAR’s RR inspection program and facilitate deriving explicit emission rates for vehicles in the higher emission regimes (typically I/M failures) to update EMFAC. Data collected from this test plan will enable calculation of the emission rates based on passing and failing emissions in place of the current methodology that determines the emission rates based on low, medium and high emission regimes.

In addition, the test program will also provide BAR the emission rates of test vehicles that fail SMOG check for the purpose of determining the effectiveness of the Smog Check Program.

If you have questions, please contact the Project Engineer, Sanika Nishandar (sanika.nishandar@arb.ca.gov) at (951) 717-6000 or Section Manager, Satya Sardar (satya.sardar@arb.ca.gov) at (951) 542-3376.