California Air Resource Board got them for half a million and now the EPA smacked them with a multi-million dollar fine.

There’s one thing that you don’t want to do if you engineer and sell aftermarket parts for a living and that’s get caught messing with a car’s emissions system in a way that negatively affects the environment. As per the Department of Justice in an official press release they dropped earlier today (Sept. 24,2018) Derive Systems, known for their Bully Dog Tuners popular with diesel truck owners, along with SCT Tuning products, reached a settlement with said DOJ and the EPA to the tune of $6.8 million when all was said and done.

As mentioned, the Department of Justice was not the first governing body to go after these nefarious aftermarket tuners. The California Air Resource Board did them in earlier last year when they fined Derive Systems for $507,000 with most of that money going to support air pollution research, cleaner diesel school buses and restitution for what they did.

When they were caught by CARB, they were only initially caught for not putting their aftermarket intakes, exhausts, and tunes through CARB certification which identifies areas in aftermarket products that don’t pollute more up to a certain point beyond OEM.

Now, the EPA also identified that they could slap Derive Systems with a much larger fine under the same premise because their tuners explicitly went against the Clean Air act of 1963.

Derive manufactured and sold custom tuning software designed to access and overwrite the original vehicle manufacturer’s software. Vehicle manufacturers design vehicle software to reduce air pollution, monitor the vehicle’s on-board diagnostics of emissions controls, and otherwise comply with the Clean Air Act.

Besides making up to and beyond 120 HP and 250 lb-ft with a simple plug and play OBD II device, which who wouldn’t want that in their diesel truck, Bully Dog Tuners did officially make available a “Crazy Larry” tune among other tunes for “Racing Applications only” that made any truck with a Triple Dog Tuner able to “Roll Coal’ or spew out ungodly amounts of smoke and unburnt fuel into the air, mainly to irritate other drivers. Although that specific type of tuning isn’t legal in some states anymore, Derive Systems definitely made it for any truck owner with a diesel to “roll coal.”

I’m glad the highest levels of government called these tuners out on there emissions cheating devices. None of these trucks are actually racing, they’re a nuisance on the road, and, as the progression of technology goes, will probably go the way of the dodo as fuel prices rise and regulations get stricter.

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