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Is it cold in here?:
A crunching sound from cartilage is called "crepitus" and it's the same root as in "decrepit".
Morituri:
Most of the time in the US, modifications to a car are legal, subject to a DMV safety inspection. In California (and now a bunch of other places) modifications to the engine or exhaust system are not: they will cause your car to fail its 'smog test' even if they reduce smog. You're not allowed to change that thing that was approved by some committee with something that wasn't. For a while, this meant that converting cars to electric drive, eliminating all possibility of burning fuel and producing exhaust, would cause them to fail their smog inspections. But that's gotten better; now there's just a form that someone can fill out.
Wanna know what they still get tetchy about?
If you have to change anything about the way the seat belt or the seat itself is attached, your registration ceases to exist. People buy aftermarket bucket seats all the time but they don't change the seat mounting. People buy and install five-point harnesses occasionally, but when they do they don't remove the stock seat belt. When you cross that line, that car is no longer legally a product of the company that made it. Your Ford Fiesta isn't a Ford Fiesta any more. You have to get new registration, new plates, fill out a custom-car-builder's form, name the new make-and-model, get a builder's VIN issued by the state, etc etc etc.... and since there's no baseline data for your newly-built vehicle, you get future smog inspections under a special 'unknown' category that about two-thirds of production cars actually fail. When your insurance company wants to know what kind of car you have, you are not allowed to call it a Ford Fiesta. Insurance may be hard to find, and possibly even expensive.
All of which means, yes, that kind of modification is *technically* legal, but the car company, otherwise under strict liability for accidents and incidents, wants nothing more to do with it because if you designed and built your own attachments for the seat belt, or changed the linkage between the seat and the frame, then your safety is no longer subject to the protections they were expected to provide.
I've done this three times now. :-/
Thrillho:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 16 Jan 2021, 17:01 ---A crunching sound from cartilage is called "crepitus" and it's the same root as in "decrepit".
--- End quote ---
That means I heard 'crepitus' when I got the top of my ear pierced I guess.
Blue Kitty:
I learned that gorillas only have one blood type, while horses have over 400,000
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 16 Jan 2021, 17:46 ---Most of the time in the US, modifications to a car are legal, subject to a DMV safety inspection. In California (and now a bunch of other places) modifications to the engine or exhaust system are not: they will cause your car to fail its 'smog test' even if they reduce smog. You're not allowed to change that thing that was approved by some committee with something that wasn't. For a while, this meant that converting cars to electric drive, eliminating all possibility of burning fuel and producing exhaust, would cause them to fail their smog inspections. But that's gotten better; now there's just a form that someone can fill out.
Wanna know what they still get tetchy about?
If you have to change anything about the way the seat belt or the seat itself is attached, your registration ceases to exist. People buy aftermarket bucket seats all the time but they don't change the seat mounting. People buy and install five-point harnesses occasionally, but when they do they don't remove the stock seat belt. When you cross that line, that car is no longer legally a product of the company that made it. Your Ford Fiesta isn't a Ford Fiesta any more. You have to get new registration, new plates, fill out a custom-car-builder's form, name the new make-and-model, get a builder's VIN issued by the state, etc etc etc.... and since there's no baseline data for your newly-built vehicle, you get future smog inspections under a special 'unknown' category that about two-thirds of production cars actually fail. When your insurance company wants to know what kind of car you have, you are not allowed to call it a Ford Fiesta. Insurance may be hard to find, and possibly even expensive.
All of which means, yes, that kind of modification is *technically* legal, but the car company, otherwise under strict liability for accidents and incidents, wants nothing more to do with it because if you designed and built your own attachments for the seat belt, or changed the linkage between the seat and the frame, then your safety is no longer subject to the protections they were expected to provide.
I've done this three times now. :-/
--- End quote ---
My father converted a couple of vans to motor homes, and that's something you can't touch here, either - or, even, if the car is old enough, install them, in the first place. The procedure here, is that you can do it, but you need a licence as a car builder, and you need to have it shipped back to the manufacturer to have it checked, and marked compliant to safety standards.
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