Toy collection? I have ONE car, lady- and by keeping it on the road instead of buying a new car every 3-4 years, I'm so far ahead of you eco-hippies and your Priuses it's not even funny.

Putting a different engine in a car doesn't affect emissions, since they all had to pass the same standards in the first place. Car nuts are interested in powerful engines, which have to be well running engines (if you want to get technical, peak torque does not come at the ideal mixture ratio, but you don't need that very often.) Car nuts are MORE aware of problems with their vehicles that might be emissions related.

Putting a NEWER engine with lower emissions in is illegal with CARB too- go figure. So is putting in an aftermarket exhaust manifold or an aftermarket cat-back exhaust, both of which don't do anything to the emissions, but will get you slapped with thousands of dollars in fines if Kalifornia finds out.

Furthermore, if Kalifornia does find out, they don't bother to find out if the part you put in actually screwed up your emissions. All they care about is that the manufacturer of that part didn't bother to pay them a hefty fee to get their product CARB certified. You could have sunshine and lolipops coming out of your tailpipe, and still get slammed with fines to wazoo. Why? Because the state wants the fine revenue, and whalehuggers can't be bothered to actually understand the intricacies of the problems they want to solve, or bother to understand the problems they create.

Want a great example of the Kalifornia Krap? At some point, Kalifornia made a law which said that no major maintenance could be required by the manufacturer within the first 100,000 miles. Timing belts on cars were rated for 90,000 miles. Guess what manufacturers did? Erased "90,000" and wrote in "100,000". The parts didn't change, and since it was outside the warranty, consumers got fucked. Same thing for all the "lifetime" fluids that manufacturers had to come out with to cope with the new change interval, like GM's DEXCOOL, which proved to be a massive fustercluck.

Furthermore, car emissions pale in comparison to the mostly unregulated scooter, motorcycle, SUV, truck, train, and plane emissions. Diesel emissions are particularly nasty for people's lungs, especially the soot from the newer TDI/CDI engines, according to a study I heard about a while back.

I get what you are saying here - and there is a twist to it that you may not know.

Whenever research on traffic and heart attacks gets out, the auto industry jumps in and claims that noise and not emissions is the culprit.

Harassing people for noise tends to play into that, never mind that more recent studies are beginning to rule out noise as a factor. Noise is an obvious class distinction, too, as you have noted.

Kind of like people exposed to very dangerous things that don't smell complaining about the odor of less dangerous/harmless things first.