[EvanAnderson]

At one point my wife's 1995 Civic had a busted exhaust pipe ahead of the muffler and was loud as hell. She reported receiving compliments from a few different Civic enthusiasts, much to her confusion.

She just wanted me to fix the broken pipe.

In our family we use the expression "farting Honda" (or Toyota, Subaru, whatever) when we hear these kinds of cars on the road.

[ErroneousBosh]

The exhaust on my old Range Rover split between the catastrophic converters and the first silencer, leaving it completely open.

The novelty of it sounding like the start of Jerry Was A Racecar Driver hadn't entirely worn off before I welded it up, I guess, but I'm not about to go around attracting attention to myself.

Not when I could see it making plate glass shop windows vibrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkE4-zsqYwo

[swasheck]

catastrophic converter is such a hilarious autocorrect.

[ErroneousBosh]

It's not an autocorrect. These things are terrible.

[amanaplanacanal]

If you have a better way to get rid of all those pollutants, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.

[ErroneousBosh]

Well, if you insist on running them on petrol, just having a lambda sensor and closed-loop mixture control breaks the back of it.

However, if you run them on propane instead of petrol - like they do for forklifts and Zambonis, where you have to run the engines indoors without people dying - you just get carbon dioxide and water vapour out. You don't need a catalytic converter and indeed if you have one it can make the pollution slightly worse by generating nitrogen oxides.

Imagine how clean our cities could have been if we'd done this 20 years ago, instead of selling people debt to buy "Cleaner Greener Diesels".

They're still emitting CO2, but a little less of it, and from fuel that would otherwise go up in smoke at the refinery flare stack - unless you want to stop making plastics and fertilisers.

[ryan42]

fart cannons galore where I live, all hours of night and day. only option is to learn to live with em

my subaru is obnoxious in looks only, I want the exhaust to be normal, lol

[chasd00]

someone stole the catalytic converter from my Honda CRV a few years ago by basically cutting off the entire exhaust system. It made for a very loud drive until we got it fixed hah.

[EvanAnderson]

It's shocking how loud even small ICE engines are. I drove a Geo Metro back in the 90s, with it's tiny little 1.0L motor (with 45 and 1/2 angry little horses-- and the half horse is the angriest of them all) and between the exhaust resonator and muffler rusting out I got to hear how loud a little motor is. Shockingly loud.

[1-more]

Think about how much louder a gas mower is than a car. They're insane!