That Keeper May Soon Become a Clunker
Cheap transportation often means driving a car whose glory years have long passed.
Americans are keeping their cars longer, but older cars have become clearly more expensive to maintain, particularly in recent years.
The state and federal clean-air rules imposed on cars produced in the early 1990s are finally coming home to sock the owners of those cars with hefty repair bills.
Even the much touted improvements that were not part of any government mandate are proving costly. Brake disks and calipers, for example, wear out sooner than drum and brake cylinders.
The burden falls most heavily on low-income drivers, traditionally the last owners of cars before the junkyard.
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Under the federal 1990 Clean Air Act and earlier California laws, cars were required to meet strict new emissions standards. The federal government required auto makers to provide 50,000-mile warranties for the cars, but the warranties have long since expired, and the owners are learning that computerized emission systems are incredibly costly to maintain.
“The low-income people can’t afford it,” said Joe Forgacs, owner of Family Smog and Auto, an independent garage in Bellflower. And, he said, repair costs are going to get higher.
The EPA had proposed a 100,000-mile warranty but was shouted down by auto makers. Don Zinger, federal chief for vehicle emissions enforcement at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said that in 1995, warranties for emission systems increased to 80,000 miles.
Still, he worries that a lot of motorists drive cars with their emission systems malfunctioning. Not all emission problems affect a car’s performance, but they do contribute to pollution.
“You can have a poisoned catalyst and a motorist might not know that,” Zinger said. “Many times with a defect, the owner doesn’t know. We hope people would get the system checked.”
Fat chance. An emission system malfunction easily can cost $500 to fix, enough to wipe out an entire month of groceries for a lot of families. Besides, a lot of mechanics have neither the skill nor the diagnostic computers to fix these systems. Forget about anybody fixing these things with a socket set and screwdriver.
As Forgacs says, “It’s not your granddaddy’s Oldsmobile any more.
“I have had cars in here with $700 emission bills, and I try to keep the costs down. I don’t go hog wild. I only replace parts that are needed. But it’s hard. People don’t understand that cars today are so sophisticated.”
It’s the flip side of clean air.
* Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but will attempt to respond in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Do not telephone. Write to Your Wheels, 1875 I St. N.W. #1100, Washington, DC 20006, or e-mail to Ralph.Vartabedian@latimes.com.
