Being a bit of a motor-head, the front page of the Wellingtonian caught my attention this morning.
The limit has been set to 95 dB for car exhausts and cops can now order noisy cars off the road and dish out fines and up to 25 demerits. This chart reckons that’s about as loud as a motor-mower or a newspaper press, far too loud for everyday (and night) driving.
Any cars which have an exhaust louder than the factory one will fail a WOF and the owner will be forced to replace the exhaust system to comply, or risk up to 25 demerit points and fines.
My old 1989 Integra.
Just walking or biking around Wellington I estimate that maybe around 15% of all traffic I see has a modified exhaust. It’s quite a popular thing these days, I like how it sounds on some cars.
I used to own an Integra with a modified exhaust, but I didn’t consider that loud at normal driving revs, just a nice hum (I admit it was a lot noisier when you put your foot down in 1st).
Of course you get the occasional dirty rotary engine in a corolla with a cake-tin sized exhaust which can actually wake people up, I think those are the types of cars the cops really want to stop.
I bet the muffler workshop boys are laughing all the way to the bank. Imagine the number of cars in NZ with modified exhausts, most of which are easily detected as non-factory, which in the next 12 months will be forced to change their exhausts back to standard.
All of these guys and girls who have saved up for years to pay for and modify their GTR’s and WRX’s with custom extractors, mufflers and exhausts (which can easily run into the high thousands for performance parts) will be pretty gutted. I believe they are trying to get around it by putting adjustable exhausts on, which can be changed for the WOF then changed back later. I wonder how long that will carry.
Thankfully this will not affect me, as I have forsaken the way of the car and switched to BMX power. The price of gas was my motoring downfall. Now if I can just get that puncture repaired..
1 Comment
August 5, 2008 at 6:35 pm
[...] Appleby was the person who convinced me blogging was a good idea - by writing about car noise levels in an interesting enough way to keep me reading ’til the end, no mean feat when typically I [...]