Posted on 06/20/2007 8:31:15 PM PDT by Ready4Freddy
You wouldn’t have had to trash it. It would trash it self. Rust and roll, well sometimes it would roll :-). I had one for a while.
No disrespect, but
Southern California ain’t Toronto.
It can be very bad here on the roads when these maniac street terrorists are having sport with the rest of us.
Being forced into being an unwilling participant in the risk of their pissing rights races is no fun.
They dont care if it is an SUV full of children either.
They do not care.
Hmm, good question. I can't remember the law. It used to be that the smog had to match the chassis, then it had to match the engine or maybe it was the other way around. So, he could have a 93 Mustang with a smogless 68 302 in it. Nevertheless, that's hardly a reason to crush his vehicle. Give him a fix it ticket.
Now if the engine was stolen, that's different story. There is a problem if you rebuild your engine. On a Chevy small block (big block too) the serial number is on the deck so if you mill the deck it takes off the serial number. You can get the machine shop to restamp the numbers but lack off numbers doesn't mean it's stolen.
I had this issue on my '69 Vette. The previous owner had every single receipt up to around '91 then they stopped. He told me only the top end had been worked on and the block was stock and numbers matching (a big deal for the Vette or classic muscle car crowd). It started running bad so I had a bad hole in #3 so I pulled the head, once I got the head off, it was clear it had 30 over pistons so the bottom end had been rebuilt and decked and the numbers re stamped. I don't know why the previous owner would omit such a thing because they did a great job on the rebuild down to new valve seats and valve guides. The only reason to not say anything was that the block was not numbers matching or original so the car would have been worth less. When I sold it, I had a shop check the block's date code and they were correct so it could have been the original block. I still doubled my money.
So it must be a California thing. They don’t check serial numbers here (Texas). They just stick a probe in the tailpipe and you either pass or you don’t.
The flat and the furious...
I'm envious!
Back in the olden days when you had to only smog your vehicle on change of owner, I knew a guy who would pull the probe out until the exhaust was diluted enough to pass. Now they can tell when you try that trick plus I believe it's now a $10k fine.
I'm glad I'm no longer a mechanic.
Maybe so, maybe not, but is screwing these guys worth setting the precedent? I think not; you obviously this it's OK. Now if we enforced the immigration laws, then this wouldn't be a problem.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Even if you don't like Harley's or open pipes, you can't honestly say they're killing people. Illegal street racing is taking lives. The crackdown is legitimate.
Seriously, you might be surprised just how much Toronto is like SoCal, outside the obvious differences in climate, and the size of the population. We’ve just had two major accidents caused by street racing in the last week, resulting in several dead.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any sympathy for these punks who use the streets, especially busy urban and suburban roads, as their personal racetrack. I just think that there are ways to punish them by enforcing existing laws rather than creating new laws and questionable “administrative penalties” like these.
This had nothing do with customization or freedom of speech. These cars were impounded when the drivers WERE ARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL RACING. If you’re racing on city streets, you deserve this, period.
That much, I agree with. The rightful owners should get their stuff back, so far as they can reasonably be determined.
Suppose they had a stolen gear shift know. Does this mean that the state has the right to steal their whole car or just take the shift knob?
Since when are gear shift knobs assigned VIN #s? There are specific violations that merit this punishment under California law, namely the use of parts with altered, defaced, or missing serial VIN #'s. These are major, structural parts of the vehicle. Everybody in the car-mod scene KNOWS exactly what that means - the parts are from a chop shop. If the ricers are gonna use parts they have every reason to know and believe are stolen, then I have no problem with the stated penalty being imposed. If they want to avoid such penalties, they should be more scrupulous about where they get their engines and trannys.
If you unknowingly purchase a stolen DVD player at a flea market does this mean that the state has the right to burn your house to the ground?
Reductio ad absurdum. A stolen engine in a car is an integral part thereof. A DVD player is not part of your house. However, if your house was being used to warehouse stolen DVD players that "fell off the truck", and they were discovered there while investigating you for cooking meth or fertilizer and diesel bombs in your kitchen, I could see a possible compelling state interest in removing said house from your possession. Your purpose in owning such premises consists of using them for illegal pursuits. The presumption is that, if returned to your keeping, you will return to the same illegal uses.
I had a 90 MR2, fun little car. You unloading an ‘87?
Says the law, no one has an inalienable right to drive a motorized vehicle on public streets.
Its a licensed activity, not a right.
Hopefully this method takes and helps put an end to needing to do it in the first place.
If not, I’m mounting 50mm cannons on my Vette. ;)
Thanks for the explanation of what exactly is behind this car crushing business, it helps to clarify things a little. So what parts of a car exactly are relavent under this law? What parts of a car are stamped with VINs, rather than just a serial number of some sort? It IS certainly suspicious, generally speaking, when serial number or VINs have been removed from anything.
We have laws that deal with Street Racers too. Apparently, incarceration takes a back seat to impounding and destroying personal property.
What do they come after next?
You may not realize it, but if a dealer has to replace the dash in your vehicle, the VIN must be relocated. We have to take the vehicle to the State Patrol and they place a sticker on the dash indicating it has been relocated. We may not reattach it to the dash.
Imagine that you replaced the dash yourself from a scrap yard and reattached the VIN yourself. The state now believes your VIN has beeb altered.
Were stolen parts returned to owners? Why weren’t the kids who owned the vehicles in jail, instead of watching them being crushed?
Give the government an inch they’ll take a mile. If you recall, seat belt laws were not ever going to be used to pull someone over for a ticket. Once in, we now have “Click-it or Ticket.”
As to the question 'Why would anybody hop up a 'burner?' The answer is 'Because they can be made to haul !@#$'.
There in nothing in the world better then blowing the doors off some fools factory 'sports car' in an 11 second Honda DX. Sometimes they cry.
Also missing from the story is any mention of the reduced number of legal drag strips in the world these days. NIMBY and all that.
NO, it isn’t emminent domain, but eerily similar in that too many think confiscation and destruction of personal property is okay when it is against someone they don’t really like.
I know that's changed with VINs everywhere now.
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