Is the Barking of Cars with Obnoxiously Loud Exhausts Legal?

Now that I’m getting old enough to be cranky without raising eyebrows, I find myself fixated on the tooting, barking, roaring, and crackling of cars with obnoxiously loud exhausts. Is this legal? Doesn’t DEQ get a crack at these things every few years? —Eric E.

There’s an old saying: “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.” No one is sure who first said this or when (according to Fox News, it was Mitch McConnell, just yesterday), but it shows how every argument has two sides. Unfortunately, when those two sides see each other as either continually flailing their fists like a tire store flappy man or going out of their way to cultivate ostentatiously large and delicate noses, it’s hard to imagine their coming to an understanding.

Department of Environmental Quality inspections don’t check volume levels directly, although plenty of things that might make your exhaust loud—like “deleting” the muffler, catalytic converter or both—will cause you to fail an emissions inspection. Still, plenty of street-legal exhausts boast of volumes “right up to” legal limits like California’s 90 decibels or Montana’s 95 dB, so I’m sure there are DEQ-approved systems out there that exceed Oregon’s 88 dB cap.

The good news, though, is that there IS a cap. It’s a Class C traffic violation to operate a vehicle whose exhaust system exceeds 88 decibels.* Moreover, loud exhaust isn’t on that list of ticky-tack violations (broken taillight, etc.) declared insufficient to justify a traffic stop by 2022’s Senate Bill 1510. It’s really illegal, and you could get pulled over for it.

But will you? The Portland Police Bureau is still badly understaffed—they’re currently prioritizing emergency calls (a recent report described it as “911-only policing”) over proactive traffic enforcement, so the chances you’re going to see a crackdown on loud tailpipes anytime soon are pretty slim.

To offer an extremely tepid defense of the gearheads, they really do seem to love this godawful racket. Muffler ads speak of “loud, high-quality sound” and “rich, aggressive and unique tone.” That sounds batshit crazy to me, but I suppose my 1990s neighbors didn’t think much of the Butthole Surfers and Jesus Lizard I was blasting in those days, either. Most of us have similar tales from our misspent youth to remind us that we too once loved ugly noises. That said, most of us also grew out of the pathological need to shove those noises down other people’s throats.

*Don’t even get me started on what happens if the charging system exceeds 1.21 gigawatts.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.