Supercharged111
Truly Awesome
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Here in the UK cats became standard fitment around the early 1990s. When a pre-early 1990s car drives past my house here (and I'm outside) I can usually smell fuel or burned engine oil or both - and that's an open A-road with traffic going around 50-60 mph. Our roads must have stank before cats - even allowing for the fact that when those cars were newer they'd have been cleaner (just due to less engine wear - but there would have been even older so cancels that probably) and fewer cars back then.
I'm not getting that though. Do you mean gasoline or diesel? Here, if there's any smell from a gasoline car with a cat its that eggy/sulphur smell - but it's pretty rare these days - though early on they did throw out a brownish gach.
Ammonia - is that the SCR that diesels employ (to control NOx)?
I've never smelled one like 'burning hair' - though I did have a cat disintegrate during an MOT (annual safety check) emissions test and it stank. Smelled more like burning brake/clutch friction material though.
I don't know what they're on about either, it's a rotten egg fart smell, i.e. sulfur smell. My Z06 was the worst. Toyotas seem to be the biggest offenders. The only time I've had a 400 stink like that was my flipper as its drivetrain had been sitting a few years. It had a stinky cat the first couple times I drove it, so I laid into it good and hard a few times, changed the plugs, and it was good to go.