Jay Leno isn't just a very rich celebrity. He is also a car guy who happens to be a very rich celebrity. That is good news for those of us who are neither rich nor celebrities but are also car guys.

Leno has made it his personal business to see to it that antique vehicles are no longer subject to the "emissions check" rigmarole that California – Leno's home state – requires owners of non-antique vehicles to go through as an ongoing condition of getting/renewing their vehicle's registration.

The whole business is ridiculous – as regards both antique and non-antique vehicles – if the object isn't the rigmarole, itself.

Why?

Well, let's start with the non-antique vehicles. All vehicles made since – roughly – the mid-late 1980s have fuel-injected, computer controlled engines. That means the air-fuel ratio – critical as regards exhaust emissions – is always optimized, because the computer adjusts the air-fuel ratio continuously. That means no routine adjustments are necessary or even possible. These cars also have oxygen sensors and catalytic converters and the combination of that plus the EFI is that exhaust emissions have been "clean" – to use the verbiage of the people pushing the rigmarole – for going on 40 years now. Put another way, the meaningfully harmful combustion byproducts that once led to the formation of smog and which constituted an actual threat to people's health have been almost entirely cleaned up since about 40 years ago.

Vehicles made since about 20 years ago are even "cleaner." Many new vehicle made since then qualify as Partial Zero Emissions (PZEV) vehicles, or nearly as "clean" at the tailpipe as electric vehicles are given credit for being.