But this is just a band-aid fix. Personally, I would just put the user in control. Let the user decide whether they want to run their car in high mileage low emissions mode or high performance mode. Now automakers can "cheat" all they want and it makes everyone better off.
You're right it some respects, but wrong in others. The person who really cares about their car's performance is just going to buy a high emission car and constantly pollute. If you allow drivers to have different driving modes then those gas guzzlers might be enticed to buy a more environmentally friendly car and leave it in low emissions mode for their day-to-day driving and put it in performance mode when they want it.
Hell you could put a green odometer in it and give a tax break proportional to the percent of miles driven in green mode to encourage it's use.
Trying to force car enthusiasts to give up performance will just drive them to older cars which don't have crippling software or dangerous hacks to bypass the restrictions.
Tht sounds like a very bad idea. When buying a car, you already have to make a tradeoff between performance, practicality and environmental impact, but at the very least you have discrete choices and you know the car will be usable. If remapping the ECU at will becomes standard, what is to stop manufacturers from basing MPG figures on a map that does 0-60 in 40 seconds? Where would you draw the line for the definition of misleading consumers? Or what's to stop rednecks from constantly running sky-high NOx and CO2 emissions?
Your implicit argument that it's really not up to consumers to decide whether to bypass emission requirements is fine. That it's "rednecks" who would do this is not.
My sincere apologies if this offended anyone. What would be an appropriate term in this context? Edit: I'm not a native speaker and have heard this term in use in the media to the point where I did not believe it to be a "racial slur" as wikipedia says it is.
So, say I want, for instance, to represent the stereotype person who rolls coal on their diesel pickup and believes global warming is a left-wing conspiracy. Look it up on youtube if you don't know what rolling coal is. (We can get into a whole debate on whether stereotypes are inherently good or bad, but that's not the point. They're a very effective commumication tool, which is why humans are so quick to label and group other humans, but obviously they're only to be used when not offensive.)
Perhaps it's just better not to stereotype here--however effective doing so might be on MSNBC or Fox News or on some politician's stump speech.
And I suspect that a luxury performance car owner would be just as likely to turn off emission controls if it would help performance as a rural pickup truck owner of whatever political persuasion (in both cases).
