News

Nah, EPA.

Money. It’s always money.

From the article:

Achtemeier charged as much at $4,500 per truck for work that often took him two hours or less. Achtemeier advertised his services on social media nationwide, doing business as Voided Warranty Tuning (VWT) or Optimized Ag. Between 2019 and 2022 his company took in more than $4.3 million in gross profits.

Yeah, someone is going to have to explain to me how $4500 worth of emissions control deletion is worth the money.

When you run out of DEF or the DPF is clogged, you can't run your truck for more than a brief while. You get half output in a limp-mode to go refill your DEF or have the DPF serviced. DEF is the reactant for the exhaust that makes diesel burn cleaner, but means modern trucks have 2 tanks now. Users hate it, but it cuts emissions massively. Also adds a few grand to the vehicle exhaust system in hardware and sensors and control units. Anyways:

Time = money.

For a commercial or even semi private vehicle if you bypass even one indicent of downtime by doing this is paid for itself.

That said, the DPF is a filter, and can physically clog and cause an exhaust fire if there is no monitoring software. I hope at least this guy had it wait till it was almost critical and then stop, not entirely disable the stop signal. Otherwise there is a serious risk to the vehicle and passengers.

These systems often cause issues and it may be quite expensive to repair but if you bypass it, it doesn't affect the performance of the vehicle.

Reduced running costs, ease of maintenance, engine efficiency.

If the "delete" was removing their catalytic convertor and not just reprogramming the ECU then there is a mild to moderate performance increase caused by reducing exhaust pressure. If it's easier to push the exhaust out then there's more power going to the wheels.

If it's just ECU changes it's probably related to the air/fuel mixture it's using. Often douchebags will hack this to "roll coal" but changing this can give you increased horsepower at the expense of emissions.

As someone whose car has a tune but still passes emissions inspections, this guy is both bad at tuning cars and also an asshole.

Tribalism, to own the libs.

Coco 'nspirators

Right, a Republican, exactly.

The way they've all reacted to climate change denialism by actively trying to make pollution as bad as possible is wild. Even if the entire world's scientific community was somehow wrong about global warming, shit like this and "rolling coal" would still be terrible for air quality, but these fucknuts apparently don't care as long as they get to "own the libs". This is peak "eating a shit sandwich to force other people to smell your breath" energy.

or they could run on propane, which doesn't make a whole lot of particulates in the first place and is cheaper anyway

I actually decided to search this because I thought the whole point of DEF was so trucks wouldn't need to use an EGR like every car does.

Apparently emissions is complicated and expensive lol, so lots of trucks have both.

Newer models however have started creating systems that remove the EGR and instead rely solely on the SCR with a bigger DEF tank and a cleanup catalyst.

I think DEF is still the right direction. Exhaust recycling has a ton of downsides that took car OEMs a while to hack their way around (or give up and plan for 150k mile expectancy).

4,500 for a mod though is still pretty expensive for something you can do yourself. Most of that cost was probably due to it being illegal, not because it's hard to accomplish.

The summary says he was having accomplices connect a laptop to the vehicle and then remotely accessing that laptop. Sounds like regular old ssh or rdp.

If you read the article he was remotely connecting to laptops that were plugged into the vehicles.