If they live in the United States of America there is no state where straight pipes are legal for road use. Nearly all aftermarket exhaust parts will have a disclaimer that they are off road only.
I like fast cars and fast motorcycle, but I hate obnoxious ones. For any street/strip car there's no reason to eliminate the catalytic converter or mufflers. Because the sound is largely about the resonance of the pipe length you can have exceedingly fast cars producing lots of horsepower be reasonably quiet especially at idle and residential speeds.
I had a heavily modified trans it was very fast It was a street legal car that I also took to the track for racing. It did have some technically off-road parts like long tube headers and other things that provide performance but it still had catalytic converters and mufflers. Between idle and about 3,000 RPM it was only slightly louder than stock not obnoxious at all above 3,000 RPM usually in the 5,000 to 6,000 range it sounded like it had an open exhaust system due to the residence value of the exhaust piping.
So anyway your neighbor is a jerk just to be a jerk and I would begin to lodge complaints with the police until they send someone out there especially if they leave for work at the same time every day and pull them over. Same thing for those Harley-Davidson idiots that want to put on straight pipes.
I don’t think the police will do anything about it anymore. It’s a non violent offense and in the name of de escalation, unless they are robbing a bank at the time, they will just ignore it. Sometimes they won’t even do anything if someone steals your car. I have three sets of plates on my car right now because of stripped screws and it seems nobody is willing to pull me over for it. 4 years ago I would have been pulled over I’m sure of it.
The police are like any agency when you make enough noise they will do it. Maybe that noise means you need to get the local media involved and other places but that's just it you got to make noise to get heard. That's what this douchebag is doing with his car So normal people need to make noise up through their city council and their police.
In Minnesota some people had their trailers stolen and dropped into a homeless encampment and the police refused to do anything to avoid a confrontation. Also in Minnesota one cities police refused to recover a stolen vehicle and the citizen had to get help from another jurisdiction. You can make all the noise you want but when the staffing is down 30-60% you might find you aren’t the priority. It’s what the people claim to want so it’s what they are getting.
Ended up having a lawyer write a letter, got the entire neighborhood to sign it (which shows how pissed I was, since I'm very nonconfrontational), and sent it to his landlord. Funny enough, his landlord is named Elmer, and has the social skills of Elmer Fud.
Perhaps not newer cars, but as soon as you register it as a classic (>25 years old), all of those rules and emissions testing goes right out of the window. The only issue you would have is local laws on noisy exhaust.
In my state, motorcycles aren't subject to any regulation at all at the machine level. I walked in and registered my 70's two stroke yamaha in minutes.
Actually that's not quite true certain states don't have inspection requirements so they never check but any car that was built from the factory with the catalytic converter is required to have a catalytic converter to be a road. A catalytic converter contributes significantly to noise reduction. For most states that would be early '70s when the federal government mandated catalytic converters he same time they started phasing out leaded gasoline.
In California their emission requirements are much stricter and it doesn't matter if your car is classic or not all factory emission systems must be present. Now if you have a non-California version of a car that you bring into California it needs to comply to the emissions of wherever it was built but if you have a California version of a car that would have been stripped of its air pump and other things those need to be restored in order to get street legal in California.
Don't confuse the testing requirements with the requirements of the federal and state law.
> A catalytic converter contributes significantly to noise reduction.
It depends, but the muffler is what mostly reduces the noise. The difference between an OEM cat and a removed cat isn't always that much in my experience.
Yes, for cats it's 1975.
Interesting but unsurprising to know about California, but I have no reason to ever travel there via classic car, or really for any reason at all.
> If they live in the United States of America there is no state where straight pipes are legal for road use.
It may be illegal in Mississippi but there's no state inspection or emissions testing to catch it. If I recall, there's a few other states that don't have inspection or emissions testing also.
I like fast cars and fast motorcycle, but I hate obnoxious ones. For any street/strip car there's no reason to eliminate the catalytic converter or mufflers. Because the sound is largely about the resonance of the pipe length you can have exceedingly fast cars producing lots of horsepower be reasonably quiet especially at idle and residential speeds.
I had a heavily modified trans it was very fast It was a street legal car that I also took to the track for racing. It did have some technically off-road parts like long tube headers and other things that provide performance but it still had catalytic converters and mufflers. Between idle and about 3,000 RPM it was only slightly louder than stock not obnoxious at all above 3,000 RPM usually in the 5,000 to 6,000 range it sounded like it had an open exhaust system due to the residence value of the exhaust piping.
So anyway your neighbor is a jerk just to be a jerk and I would begin to lodge complaints with the police until they send someone out there especially if they leave for work at the same time every day and pull them over. Same thing for those Harley-Davidson idiots that want to put on straight pipes.