Quote:
Originally Posted by JST
You can't, unless you do what DC does and have them all at a government run facility. Otherwise, there's no way a shop is going to overlook the "business development" opportunity that comes with some poor sucker bringing their car in and asking what's wrong with it. I mean, your experience is probably the best you can hope for--at least they were identifying legitimate issues that should be fixed, even if they don't constitute a failure.
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Meh. That's part of the problem, but that's not the biggest problem with the MD system. When I lived in CA, smog inspections were done at gas stations with service shops that clearly had the same motives...but the state didn't give them the same opportunity.
Unlike MD's completely subjective safety inspection criteria that almost entirely leaves it to the opinion of the person performing the inspection, CA's smog testing was almost entirely objective. You stick the probe in the exhaust, plug in ODB if applicable, enter the car info into the test gear and the results spit out pass/fail. The subjective part was the tech looking to see if the required emissions parts were present and connected.