Since 1999, Ontario has had a program called Drive Clean. It\u2019s designed to stop people from driving cars that spew out a ton of pollution. Older cars have to get checked every two years just to be registered.<\/p>\n
So, every two years, I take whatever relic I\u2019m driving into town for this test. And every time, my car passes.<\/p>\n
This time, my car failed. Horribly, miserably, dramatically failed. <\/p>\n
How could this happen? I rarely drive, I don\u2019t speed, I get the oil changed regularly\u2026I was baffled.<\/p>\n
The mechanic sent me off with instructions: Stay calm, drive 40 kilometers (25 miles) in two days then come back for a retest.<\/p>\n
Right\u201440 kilometers. I\u2019m a recluse with a home office. It takes me months\u2014not days\u2014to drive that far. But I did it. I drove the long way home. I drove to the mailbox, I drove to the corner store and (since driving stresses me out) I drove to the wine store. I drove 40 kilometers in two days, then went back for the retest.<\/p>\n
My car failed. Again<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when things got tense (and expensive). The mechanic attached something to my car’s tailpipe, poked around on his computer, printed out a bunch of papers\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cYour car\u2019s just fine,\u201d he announced. Fine? Then why, I asked, did it fail the first two tests?<\/p>\n \u201cYou probably drive like an old lady,\u201d he said (while avoiding eye contact).<\/p>\n Yes, turns out you can fail a Drive Clean test simply by driving too slowly too often\u2014gunk builds up and confuses their testing equipment.<\/p>\n His parting words: \u201cNext time, get your grandson to drive the car for a day before you bring it in.\u201d \u2028\u2028My grandson hasn\u2019t been born, yet. I guess I won\u2019t be registering another car for at least 16 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since 1999, Ontario has had a program called Drive Clean. It\u2019s designed to stop people from driving cars that spew out a ton of pollution. Older cars have to get checked every two years just to be registered. So, every two years, I take whatever relic I\u2019m driving into town for this test. And every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}