So many American drivers are cheating on pollution rules today that clean-air gains of the past decade are going up in smoke.

Exhaust fumes from autos, trucks and buses now are blamed for 99 percent of the 120 million pounds of lead particles that are spewed into the atmosphere above the U.S. every year.
Making motorists the latest environmental villains are estimates that emission controls on 30 million vehicles have been either sabotaged or intentionally neglected.
Behind this deliberate fouling of the air: The 7 cents per gallon that drivers can save, on average, by buying leaded instead of unleaded gasoline.

Despite polls showing strong public support for clean air, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 1 out of every 5 motorists ruins pollution controls with leaded gas or bypasses them with substitute exhaust pipes.

To combat these polluters, federal and state authorities are starting to push hard for a reduction of all sources of lead in the air. Environmental officials in Illinois and Massachusetts, along with those in Chicago and New York City, have petitioned the EPA to ban lead in gasoline.

Hit in the pocket. In a year-old federal crackdown, 800 car dealers, gasstation owners, muffler mechanics and local public and private fleet operators face stiff fines for removing clean-air equipment. A Cadillac and Jeep dealer in Bangor, Me., faces $70,000 in fines for taking catalytic converters off seven cars last year. Among Lake Worth, Fla., police cars and Polk County, Fla., sheriff’s patrol cars, 34 converters were missing during a March inspection.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has approved a bill that would add to the federal Clean Air Act’s criminal penalties a $2,500 fine for individual motorists who tamper with vehicle pollution-control systems.

At the heart of the problem is a belief among many motorists that gas mileage and engine performance are improved with leaded gasoline. EPA motor-fuels chief Richard Kozlowski says that the attitude is one of: “I know what’s best for my car, and no one’s going to tell me what to do with it.”

Loss of control. Automotive engineers say that “misfueling” a car designed to burn unleaded gasoline can permanently disable its catalytic converter after just three fill-ups. Catalytic converters, the core of automotive pollution-control systems, trap exhaust gases and transform pollutants into less harmful compounds.

Federal rules try to discourage fuel switching by limiting sales of leaded gas to pumps with nozzles larger than the gas ports on vehicles burning unleaded fuel. But that can be overcome with a nozzle adapter available for less than $5 at most auto-parts stores.
Troublesome, too, are drivers who simply purchase substitute exhaust pipes, for $50 or less, to bypass the pollution-control system entirely.

Yet, according to the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association, the pennies-per-gallon saving on leaded fuel is absorbed in higher repair bills for fouled spark plugs and mufflers.
With federally mandated programs to inspect auto-emission controls in place in 23 states, it’s getting harder for scofflaws to keep altered cars on the road. Minor flaws in clean-air equipment can be corrected for less than $30, but replacing a catalytic converter can cost $400.

Exhaust that bypasses the converters has as much as eight times more smog components–hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides–than do emissions from vehicles with working pollution controls. These compounds are converted by sunlight into the brownish haze that often obscures the skylines of major U.S. cities.
Most worrisome are the effects of lead on human health. Tiny particles of lead are inhaled and wind up in the body’s circulatory system.

When lead gets into the bloodstream it inhibits the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain. Health experts agree that lead levels above 30 micrograms per deciliter of blood can cause kidney, liver, blood and reproductive disorders. Evidence is mounting, too, that high levels of lead in the blood lower IQ scores of inner-city children by 4 to 5 points.

Search for other ways. Petroleum refiners already are moving away from lead additives. Only Chicago-based Nalco and Du Pont’s Ethyl Corporation still supply lead to gasoline producers. In April, Shell Oil introduced an unleaded gas with additives designed to curb an engine’s appetite for higher octane.

Even so, fuel switching has scuttled the expected schedule for phasing out leaded gas. Until recently, regulators believed that the nation’s civilian fleet of 159 million cars, trucks and buses would soon be dominated by vehicles produced after 1975, when catalytic converters became mandatory for gasoline-fueled engines.

Regulators find instead that older cars, many with faulty pollution equipment or none at all, are staying on the road longer. A 1982 EPA survey of vehicles in 10 cities found disabled or disconnected converters in 18 percent of the autos tested in Tulsa. In Dade County, Fla., and Houston the proportions were 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

“We think that’s low,” says EPA chief William Ruckelshaus of the survey. “We can’t even estimate how often fuel switching happens.”
Now Ruckelshaus is considering a 90 percent reduction in lead use by refineries. That may be the only way, he says, to fight the renegade motorist with a heavy lead habit.