Hiding true reasons behind Good Samaritan concepts (Score 2, Interesting)

While it is all fine and dandy to claim the bill is to help out the service market the fact of the mater is this bill is help counter what the automotive industry has been doing lately. In the last several years as demand for SUVs and more horsepower vehicles Auto manufacturers are getting more and more clever with emissions testing. Today's cars can figure out when they are being emissions tested, between a certain set of operation parameters (like CARB's dyno-tests) and certain requests from the OBD-II interface the ECU can easily figure out what is being done to the vehicle and tune its behavior accordingly. There are many, many reasons for this; some of which are to give the vehicle more performance on the road, others to counter some legacy laws of the EPA such as the rule saying all vehicles must have catalytic converters, converters that have to be doing something, however today's modern electronically controlled vehicles under steady state burn fuel clean enough that they don't emit measurable levels of unburned fuel, thus the engine has to be de-tuned to meet the EPA rule saying cats have to be doing something. Detroit Diesel got in some serious trouble a little while back when the EPA found out it was detecting emissions testing and adjusting performance parameters accordingly. By forcing the car manufacturers to open up their bus protocols the EPA can make sure that there is no special emissions test mode that the ECU is going into and make sure the numbers are real. I doubt anything from this law will help the automotive service industry.