Truth about used automobiles in SVG

Tue, Jan 27, 2015

by Jahee Campbell- Brennan, Consulting Automotive Engineer MEng, AM/MechE; Eva Elings, OBD Systems Technician; and Floyd Campbell, OBD Systems Technician

In December 2014, we started an investigation of vehicles imported to SVG, with a view to providing vehicle diagnostic services to the general population. What we understood about the car market in particular is astounding in the context of vehicle life cycle in SVG, environmental pollution and economics, with regard to these vehicles.{{more}}

Concerning vehicle diagnostics, we refer to OBD II (On-Board Diagnostics). This is a vehicle’s computer controlled, self-diagnostic and reporting system, implemented across North American and the European markets in the latter part of the 1990s and early 2000s respectively. OBD II specifies global standards of emissions control and makes it unlawful to sell new light vehicles and trucks without the OBD system installed. This closed the market for Japanese manufacturers to sell non-OBD compliant vehicles in those markets. They had to find markets elsewhere for the banned vehicles that they could not export to North America and Europe right here in the Caricom region, including St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Japanese manufacturers themselves did not mandate their domestic sale vehicles to OBD II standards until 2002; hence, the bulk of the cars in St Vincent and the Grenadines imported from Japan are pre-2002 models carrying no OBD II system and make up, we estimate, some 90-95 per cent of all the vehicles on Vincentian roads.

The installation and importance of the OBD system in vehicles relates to the US clean air legislation, implemented in the 90s in order to clean up the incredible air pollution faced by states like California with its tropical environment.

The OBD system provides monitoring to determine operating conditions of the vehicle’s catalytic converter (used to purify its exhaust emissions.) The vehicle’s computer (it’s ECU) and its OBD component monitor the output from various sensors on the vehicle’s power-train to identify problems or damage that may develop due to these operating conditions, with the potential to impact the health of the catalytic converter. If the catalytic converter is compromised or dies, the vehicle becomes a pile of polluting nasty junk metal.

Secondary to this, the OBD system is important so as to monitor and make the driver aware about the vehicle’s overall health, with regard to its engine performance and other mechanical and safety structures – fuel efficiency, air intake pressures and temperatures, air/fuel ratios etc are all monitored variables. To be able to receive reports from the system and display visible warnings to your dashboard indicating potential damaging and dangerous conditions is crucial to the user’s health, the wider public’s health and national health resources, as well as the health of the vehicle itself.

That we cannot monitor these parameters without ODB diagnostics available on a vehicle is a grave disadvantage indeed to the SVG population as a whole.

The vehicles are already old; the Japanese imports, in particular, are aged from late 90s up to 2002; we have encountered examples dated 2005 that we could not read. Repairing them becomes a matter of hit and miss guess work. The vehicles we estimate within the next 10 years will start to die ‘en masse’ and we, the SVG people, will have to dispose of a lot of junk metal and all the other associated environmental contaminants. The Japanese exporters are effectively using the Caricom region and SVG as one big mass dumping ground. They know the life cycle of the vehicles is near completion; send them to us and they don’t have to do the recycling. They get cash for vehicles that should have been confined to the scrap heap even in Japan.

It is our opinion that the St Vincent government, or rather Caricom, should make it illegal to import these vehicles into our region. What will be the Japanese reaction to this? They still want their markets here. They will have to send us vehicles that are ODB II compliant with catalytic converters healthy and functional, where the vehicles can be monitored and defined as roadworthy with extended life cycles. We will have cleaner air, particularly in areas like downtown on a hot day; we will have better performing roadworthy vehicles and we would not be importing cars with minimum remaining life cycles.

For individual drivers in SVG, particularly those with European and North American manufactured vehicles and those imported after 2002 from Japan, we at EFFECTIVE AUTO DIAGNOSTICS can help you maintain the health and extended life cycle of your vehicle via our auto diagnostic services. We are in the Villa area and we will send a technician to your vehicle on booking. Contact us: +17844967978 – www.jcb-eng.com/ead