Retooling of State Auto Smog Checks Urged by Officials : Pollution: They say cars have become more complex. The plan could put local garages out of the inspection business.

Faced with tougher federal air pollution standards and increasingly complex cars, California will have to vastly upgrade its current smog inspection methods, which rely primarily on local service stations and garages, and may have to move toward a more sophisticated system of central testing, according to state and federal smog officials.

During three days of legislative hearings last week, and in subsequent interviews, California’s current Smog Check system was praised by experts as the best in the country, but also was criticized as ill-equipped to deal with today’s high-tech automobiles.

Federal officials said that the only way for California to meet tougher standards will be to employ far more expensive and sophisticated test equipment, which probably could only be done at centralized testing centers, effectively putting local gas stations out of the Smog Check business.

State officials hold out the hope that it may be possible to avoid going to a centralized inspection program if existing Smog Check testing stations can be upgraded to deal with increasingly sophisticated engines.

But the consensus of experts at hearings to consider possible changes in the Smog Check system was that there will be dramatic changes within a few years.

They described a future in which Californians, instead of having their smog devices checked by 19,000 technicians at 8,000 locations around the state, would drive to central stations located throughout the state’s polluted areas. There motorists would run their vehicles through a four-minute test that would be much more thorough than present procedures.

If repairs were needed, they would be done at separate garages, ending the era of your friendly, or not so friendly, local service station mechanic who both inspects the car’s emission control system and fixes it if necessary.

Such changes could devastate the thousands of businesses that currently do smog checks. Service stations and small garage owners, who would be unable to afford the new testing equipment, could be expected to resist changes in the law.

Richard Wilson, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s mobile sources division, said, “California had a very good system but it’s not effective anymore.”

Only a “high-tech, high-volume, test-only design”--and the California system is none of these--will meet the standards of the 1990 Federal Clean Air Act amendments, Wilson said.

John Cabaniss, an EPA policy analyst, said California “showed the way in the early days of smog testing . . . but car technology has changed dramatically in the last five years and California needs a new approach, at least for the newest cars.”

Said Carla Anderson, chief consultant to state Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, “We seem to be engineering ourselves to the point where we can’t test the cars effectively.” Presley presided over the three-day joint hearing of the Senate Appropriations and Assembly Transportation committees.

The preliminary findings from a two-year study commissioned by the state Air Resources Board provide evidence that the Smog Check system is not working well.

In the study, 1,200 vehicles with known smog device defects are being taken to randomly selected smog inspection stations to see how many of the problems are spotted by inspectors and how much pollution is reduced by repairs.

Reporting on the results from the first 700 cars, R.J. Sommerville, air pollution control officer for San Diego County and chairman of the statewide inspection and maintenance review committee, told the legislators that reductions were only 16% for hydrocarbons, 14.5% for carbon monoxide and 7.6% for oxides of nitrogen.

With better test procedures and higher-quality repairs, reduction levels should have reached 48% for hydrocarbons, 41% for carbon monoxide and 28% for oxides of nitrogen, he said.

“Given the direction of the new federal requirements and given the preliminary analysis of the effectiveness of the current program, it is undeniable at this point that we need to find something better,” Sommerville said in an interview.

Not only are the cars more complicated, with computers and intricate electronic systems, but there also is a shortage of well-trained mechanics to inspect and repair them, several witnesses told the legislative committees.

“The business is changing very fast and the technicians aren’t keeping up,” said James R. Schoning, chief of the Bureau of Automotive Repair, which runs the state Smog Check program.

“The days of the shade tree mechanic are over,” said Bill Sessa, spokesman for the Air Resources Board.

The federal EPA believes that California could solve many of its problems by moving to a centralized inspection system, in which large numbers of vehicles are run through sophisticated tests.

In such a program, a car would be placed on a dynamometer--the EPA calls it a “treadmill for cars”--for several minutes and tested at various driving speeds. EPA officials say this would provide a more accurate measure of tailpipe pollutants than California’s present test, which is conducted only at idle speed.

This test also would check oxides of nitrogen, which are an increasing source of pollution but are not tested in the current California program, EPA officials said. (However, the state does require “under the hood” visual inspections that sometimes spot defective parts that are causing this type of emission.)

The kind of inspection that the EPA favors would have to take place in large, centralized facilities in order to be cost effective. It would cost at least $200,000 to set up a smog check station using the latest in high-tech inspection equipment, several experts said, and that would drive most small smog check operators out of business.

John Wilson, who runs a chain of Smog Check stations in Southern California, told the legislators, “That’s the last thing small business needs in times like these.”

“What do we do with all those testing stations?” asked Presley, the author of the legislation that created the Smog Check system. “It would be quite an uprooting for those people. We’d have to be sure that any improvement we were getting made that worthwhile.”

The federal EPA’s Wilson said high-volume, centralized testing could be carried out in California for about $17 per test, once every other year. This would be less than the statewide average fee now paid--$32 to the inspection station, plus $6 for the state smog certificate.

However, repair costs could increase.

These currently average about $57, in a sliding-scale system that ranges from a maximum of $50 for the oldest cars to $300 for the newest. The 1990 federal Clean Air Act amendments increase the ceiling to $450 for all cars.

Although centralized smog inspection may be cheaper, it also is likely to be less convenient, as motorists are “ping-ponged” back and forth between test facilities and repair shops.

Inspection should to be divorced from repairs, federal officials believe.

“We’ve concluded that, in order to make these programs work well, you have to separate inspection from repair,” Cabaniss said. “That’s the only way to maintain quality control and to correct past problems that have been identified.”

He also noted that there is a widespread belief that having both inspection and repair done by the same shop is a conflict of interest. Surveys in three states have found that more than 70% of the public believes there should be separation between the two activities, Cabaniss said.

A centralized system need not be run by the state but could be done by private operators supervised by the state, as is the case in Arizona.

If California were to adopt a centralized inspection system, it would, to some extent, represent a return to an earlier day.

In the late 1970s the state operated a centralized program in four counties in and around Los Angeles. There were 15 to 20 stations, at which only inspections were conducted, while needed repairs were done by state-licensed service stations.

However, when the first major statewide program began in 1984, the decision was made to go with the decentralized approach.

Whatever changes are made to the current system would be gradual and would take several years.

Sommerville of the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District said the statewide Inspection and Maintenance Review Committee would complete a report on how to improve the system by next April and he expected these findings to carry weight with Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature.

Presley said 1992 will be a “defining year,” in which the various interest groups will seek consensus. The senator said he expects to have legislation to change the program ready by January, 1993.