ECU Tune and Failed Emissions Testing Experience

They are already require biometrics, the webcams are coming soon.

https://www.bar.ca.gov/biometric

https://www.thedrive.com/news/calif...s-and-biometric-checks-to-smog-check-stations

This state is literally fucking insane.

 

The files are in the vftuner "supported vehicles" folder. But I will PM you the correct stock file for your truck.

 

Lol, did you miss the California part?

 

Touché.

I pity the fool who has to watch that footage… Anyway, I don’t see how this will actually prevent fraud. People are always creative and the law can only play catch-up

 

Not sure re biometics, but Massachusetts (or as I call it, Jackassachusetts) has been doing the monitoring since 2019. The inspector has to don an earpiece and camera as they conduct the inspection. If they skip an item (say, the horn) and it's being live monitored, the person monitoring from the state can talk into the earpiece and instruct the inspector to do it.

My 2 seat truck failed in 2019 for no middle seatbelt, despite MA law making it illegal to have any person in the middle of the bench seat in my truck. I thought it was resolved as I argued the decision and won through the Registry, but it happened again this year and I had to do it again.

 

It should be possible to read the CVN before a flash, and reprogram it in after, no?

 

I'm sure, since it is a function of the bytes being written I'm guessing, similar to a checksum or crc value. But of course there's probably something else going on that makes it more difficult than that...

 

Stuff like that makes me say "Boy, I sure do hate the government," with increasing frequency. :/

 

That's awesome! I love seeing OTT add legitimacy to the Tacoma tuning world!

 

It seems "checksum" may be a misnomer. One of the OP's links mentions being able to overwrite. If they're just checking a predefined checksum from a manufacturer and you're able to write whatever you want instead of their equipment actually recreating that checksum from what's encompassed in the ECU at the time, I would think spoofing would be trivial for someone who has already cracked into it.

 

Congratulations! This is some next level achievement. Way to keep moving the community forward in a level of professionalism yet seen!! Love it!!

 

I get that the aim is to stop people with complete shitboxes from getting stickers of course. But my situation is a classic case of bureaucracy without common sense.

MA law says a child seat can't ride in the front seat unless you can manually turn off the airbags (not an option on mine). If a person who didn't need a child seat sat in the middle their left leg is going to to be right where my pedals are due to the floor shifter and bench seat, which is also illegal. Yet this station failed me for not having a belt there.

 

Move along now, this is totally unrelated to tuning and borderline politics rant, which will get you banned on TW.

 

Not sure why you think it's political. I'm speaking about the laws for inspection in my state which was brought up.

 

I hate forum busybodies as well.

On topic- I've been looking at getting my truck tuned. This thread was quite alarming to see pop up, as PA is hooked into cali's CARB requirements, so this may become an issue for me as well. Im glad to see discussion about how to prevent this issue from affecting me. (Although my inspector is a long time sticker slapper, things will change with increased enforcement requirements, unfortunately.)

 

I doubt it's that easy. I'm sure the ECU code does a checksum/crc test at runtime, and that would mean the emission tester could read in the ECU code and calculate the value as well and just compare against a complete list of factory values. So the OVT tune would need to add a few dummy bytes to the code so the original factory value would be the result.

Certain computer software copy protection worked that way, you can change it all around, calculate the new checksum value, then add bytes in a dummy spot in the code to make that value go back to what the original one was. But of course I'm just guessing what Toyota is doing in their ECU, it may be super complex...but somehow I doubt it.

 

Yeah, not sure why I got singled out for a lecture on it. Eh..people need some people skills.

 

CVN is a checksum, so yeah it can be faked/spoofed. Whether they want to put themselves in CA's crosshairs is another story.

 

Will the EO list multiple CVNs to account for tire size/gear ratio changes in the tunes, or will there be an EO for each possbile CVN, or none of the above?

 

@Double Phister

CARB-EO and SEMA-CE do not use CVN's for the approved calibrations for flash tunes. There would need to be thousands of CVN's and the ability to match to stock. CARB and others looking at CVN's use a stock CVN match only.

When a smog technician recognizes a non-stock CVN they will look at the vehicle for the CARB-EO sticker or in other states a CARB-EO or SEMA-CE sticker or request a Certificate from the vehicle owner. This is what is used to pass a CVN mismatch.

As an example, our SEMA-CE sticker will have a 3D barcode that a browser will take you directly to our Certificate of Emissions.




The Inspection station or anyone can also search the SEMA database here to see who has received certificates.

https://www.semagarage.com/semacertified/emissions/search

Kind regards,

John