Is the EPA Confiscating SUVs?

Recently, the Antiplanner suggested that electronics the Obama administration wants to mandate in all new cars would allow government bureaucrats to turn off your car if they thought you were driving too much. Even I wondered if that was a bit over the top, but last week, Fox News broadcast a disturbing report that the Environmental Protection Agency had confiscated people’s sport-utility vehicles for polluting the air.

If this report is true, it certainly would help make my case that we should be wary of government-mandated electronic controls in our cars. However, it turns out there a few minor errors in the Fox report: First, it wasn’t the EPA. Second, the car wasn’t confiscated because it polluted (or, at least, not just because it polluted). Third, it didn’t even happen in South Carolina.

The issue was previously reported by WBTV, a television station in Charlotte, North Carolina (see below). The owners of the car in question, the Brinkleys, live in Statesville, NC, which is near Winston-Salem and definitely is not in South Carolina.

Their car was a Land Rover Defender. Made primarily for other countries, most cars of this model do not meet federal safety and air pollution standards. A few thousand were made for import into the U.S., but most were not.

Cars made more than 25 years ago are exempt from the federal law, so dealers sometimes alter the vehicle identification numbers to make cars appear older than they really are (apparently, Land Rover doesn’t significantly change its models from year to year or even decade to decade). The North Carolina car is apparently suspected of being one of those cars.
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The confiscations, at least some of which took place on July 15, were first reported on a Land Rover discussion forum. This led Jalopnik to post an article saying a total of 40 Land Rovers had been seized.

Contrary to Fox News, there is no evidence that the Environmental Protection Agency was involved. Instead, the cars were confiscated by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. This could be as much for safety issues such as headlights, seat belts, bumpers, and roll bars as for air pollution issues.

Though the safety and air pollution laws are federal, they are normally enforced by the states, which should refuse to register cars that don’t comply with federal laws. Instead of swooping in and confiscating peoples’ cars, the federal government could have asked the states to confirm that the cars met federal standards before re-registering them. Though Wired notes that the feds have previously sent such illegally imported cars to the crusher, the confiscation remains disturbing even if the EPA wasn’t involved.

Apparently, the real target of the federal investigation was a Wilmington, NC, dealer who allegedly illegally imported vehicles and then changed their ID numbers. “The vehicle owners, who are victims of this criminal scheme, will have an opportunity to seek restitution for their losses,” an official with Immigration and Customs told Jalopnik–though that restitution would probably have to come from the unscrupulous dealer, and the Brinkleys might have trouble getting anything as they apparently are three or four sales removed from the dealer.

The Brinkleys insist their car was made in 1985, which would make it old enough to be exempt from the law. But Land Rover did not start using the “Defender” badge until 1991, so there’s something fishy about that story. They bought their car used, so it is easily possible the seller deceived them or had been deceived by a previous owner. The Brinkleys also claim that, after buying it, they spent $20,000 bringing it up to federal standards; good luck on recovering that from the dealer.

The various reports say the owners of the seized cars are challenging the action in court. While they are no doubt appealing the confiscations, the court documents cited in many of the reports were actually federal documents, not from a lawsuit brought by the car owners. Jalopnik says the documents show that the feds targeted 61 vehicles, but perhaps they only found 40 of them.

Apparently, no one at Fox or other news outlets, with the exception of Jalopnik, has made any effort to find the other 39 owners, or to find out if any of the confiscated cars actually met federal standards, or why, if they did not, the states registered them. This could be a good example of the unduly heavy hand of the federal government, but more information is needed to make the story credible.