DOJ sues eBay for selling ‘rolling coal’ devices; fines could hit $2 billion [article]
DOJ sues eBay for selling ‘rolling coal’ devices; fines could hit $2 billion [article]
Rolling coal is the practice of tampering with a vehicle's emissions control system, causing it to spew black clouds of sooty exhaust.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6820708
Rolling coal is the practice of installing a tampering device to pump more diesel into a vehicle’s engine than it can handle, leading it to spew out sooty black clouds of exhaust that pollute the air.
The practice is sometimes used as a form of anti-environmental protest. Coal rollers, or the drivers who engage in the action, may intentionally target Teslas, Priuses or other electric or hybrid vehicles.
Do people decide to be this awful out of the blue? Or is some genetic defect from being inbred?
78Take a bunch of white dudes with no personality or interests of their own and expose them to manipulative content and ideas presented in a "cool" way and BAM this is what you get.
28I target liberals every day yet an electric car triggers me to the point of needing to kill off the off the only planet we have by burning more diesel at its highest cost in decades.
4
I'm not a psychologist but it sounds a bit like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation - "You want me not to pollute so I pollute even more"
15Basically their reasoning skills peaked at age 4
15
You've never been to Alberta
15Albertan here. Had a little Toyota truck in front of me the other day. I always liked those because my uncle had one. When the light turned green the modified exhaust spewed black smoke from a low exhaust point, nearly blinding me and smelling like hell. I wanna stick a potato in that exhaust pipe so bad.
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Out of the blue. Was driving through Norfolk a few years ago and this ford pickup decided to roll coal several times in the I-64 tunnels between Newport News and Norfolk. Dude blacked out the entire tunnel multiple times and they were clearly trying to cause a major accident. I follwed the sonofaremoved to get his plates and tried to call the highway police number but the lady on the other end refused to listen (kept pretending i was talking about normal exhaust shit) and started threatening me for reporting it.
10They fucking do this to me on my bike too. I don't even ride on the roads! It's only when I'm crossing the streets that I see cars
9All the fucking time but fortunately I have my ulock in a sleeve within reach and can take out their rear views as needed or window for more deserving assholes
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It’s evidently the mating call of the redneck, signaling to potential mates that they may have a micro-penis, but they have enough money to pay for plastic surgery, the holy grail of rednecks.
7Most of them aren't inbred, they're just fairly well-to-do suburbanites or rich rural farm boys who have never experienced anything resembling hardship their entire life and therefore feel oppressed when they are asked to consider people other than themselves.
1Pedophiles are genuinely the shittiest people you will ever interact with and they deserve nothing but to be [redacted oh my god so redacted]
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So these people actually pay money to look like giant assholes…
34They don't just look like giant asshole, the act like it ! I have seen a few here too (Gatineau/Quebec/Canada) and they love to piss off people by spewing that black stinky smoke directly in the face of bike riders and people walking around. Pisses me off that these assholes make enough money to buy these huge trucks just to piss off good people.
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Bout damn time someone started shutting down these micro-penis projecting a-holes.
21The real solution is Biden doing an executive order that there needs to be federal emissions tests like some states have. Then codify it when we get a functional government again.
Not just for shit like this, but when you stop and think for 2 seconds, it's fucking insane that we basically let any vehicle use our roads. There's a shit ton of vehicles that aren't fit for the road, and we're just taking the owners word that they're safe.
It doesn't even have to be annual checks right away, have em do it every 3-5 years and then maybe see if we can do annuals later.
20Lot of states do inspections Oklahoma definitely needs them. And I see these trucks all the time in my state. Didn't know it was a device doing it until I read this article but now I know. Bullshit and we need to take the license away from people who do this.
5I disagree. maybe for diesel vehicles like this, but for most vehicles such programs are not effective. We killed ours off completely a while back.
Decades ago in another state, my car was slightly out spec for the year, and it costed me $1,200 to fix. At the time I was living on my own and made $9/hour. I needed my vehicle to go to work to earn a living. I was lucky enough to be able to get a loan from a friend.
The only thing inspections lead to is a tax on the poor, just like most other types of vehicle citations.
The only way such a program is acceptable to me is if there were some mechanism to get your vehicle “repaired” at no cost to you.
3I mean, you have a point, but the counter is that these vehicles are literally not safe to drive either. There's no easy perfect solution, I think we should regulate cars, I've seen some real POS cars on the road that shouldn't be
9You're absolutely right, but this argument about a "tax on the poor" is used to justify everything that's wrong with cars. We need to solve this properly with a social safety net and alternatives to cars.
2Yeah that makes sense, put others lives at risk because you can't afford to fix your car.
1This and people getting profiled and harassed. So many stories of people in bone stock cars getting pulled over, stopped for long periods of time because an officer thinks they might have something illegal installed. People moding cars like this will most likely just pay someone to pass the test because that's exactly how people get around these tests now.
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I loved the fact that I didn't need an emissions test for several years after buying a new car, but I hate that it essentially boils down to an inconvenience, a tax of sorts, for less financially inclined people. Even if emissions tests are free, it's still time wasted, but only if you're not wealthy.
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There are EV owners, and then there’s these fucks.
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