Porsche owners have poured toxins into the air for decades, with little to no liability to those harmed.

Now a groundbreaking enforcement of pollution laws seems to be honing in on noise, rather than the other forms of pollution.

Fitted with sensitive microphones, the $35,000 cameras detect and capture everything from loud exhausts and backfires to honking and blasting music. Eighty-five decibels is the threshold for receiving a fine, which starts at $800 for a first offense and rises to $2,500 for repeat offenders. For reference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention places the average environmental noise level of city traffic inside a car at 85 decibels, indicating that City officials are targeting those who go above and beyond a normative sound level.

…[a Porsche driver thus caught making noise] was initially puzzled by the violation. Sure, he admits to hitting 35 mph in a 25 mph zone, but he wasn’t speeding excessively or wringing out the rear-mounted engine, either.

What? He thought 35 in a 25 wasn’t excessive?

Where do these people learn math? Driving 10 mph over in a 25 mph urban area is the definition of excessive.

In urban areas, driving merely 3 km/h (2 mph) or faster above the posted or implied speed limit is considered a punishable infraction…

No wonder he was puzzled why his excessive noise making was ruled excessive. This guy doesn’t care about what’s at stake when he speeds and pollutes excessively, begging laws to be enforced to protect society from such criminal acts.

And then, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, this “belief-based” anti-science guy aggressively tried in court over and over again to prove Porsche designed noise pollution as “stock” just so owners like him could cheat and get away with it.

Instead his protests have ended up proving the opposite, Porsche is failing tests every time in court for good, albeit not broad enough, safety reasons.

Specifically, research shows that prolonged sleep disruption, hearing loss, hypertension, and heart disease are all linked to consistent noise pollution. Additionally, the impacts of noise are specifically detrimental to children, yielding decreased memory, struggling reading skills, and lower test scores when consistently exposed to high levels of noise. With noise monitored by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as well as 311 noise complaint data, the top sonic offenders in NYC are unsurprisingly traffic…

Fun fact?

Noise pollution monitoring is far safer politically to enforce than other pollution forms because… the biggest polluters (e.g. utilities like gas companies) aggressively shut down any attempts to measure their crimes.

It’s a wonder VW was caught cheating on American air pollution laws, while Exxon, Tesla, GM and Ford were not, for example. Tesla in particular lit up horribly toxic diesel pollution centers on purpose to troll regulators after VW had been caught, and I’ll bet you never even heard about it.

So this story is really about German car companies having little to no American political clout to defeat public interest safety laws that keep cities safe from known dangers.

It’s not that if he drove a Ford he would have been granted a loophole to harm, it’s that he isn’t getting any support from Porsche because they know how badly this fight to do harm ends for them.

Remember 10 years ago how Germany tried to weigh in on this noise issue internationally?

Future Porsche sports cars could get away with being almost four times noisier than regular cars while high performance versions of the BMW 3 series, Audi A4 and Mini Cooper could become almost twice as loud under German plans for weak international limits on vehicle noise. […] Transport noise is linked to 50,000 fatal heart attacks every year and 200,000 cases of cardio-vascular disease in the EU. […] At full throttle, sports cars could get away emitting over 100 decibels, equivalent to a pneumatic drill.

Well then, German car companies seem to have been headed into their infamous Diesel-Gate fiasco believing at that time they could get away with anything — that all forms of intentional pollution would be good for their brand.

Indeed, noise-polluting Porsche cheats read almost exactly like the diesel-polluting VW cheat designs.

Police chief Dieter Schäfer snitched to the authorities at the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA), the agency responsible for certifying that vehicles comply with regulations, about the noise made by cars with sport exhaust modes. Referring to exhaust flaps, which keep performance cars quiet and in compliance with noise regulations at moderate loads but open up when drivers step on the throttle or select a performance driving mode, the police chief said, “We can’t have something certified that makes a large amount of noise in real life.”

Ah, how times have changed. Today it seems clear that American cities would be well within reason to continue to chase Porsche execs under the famous VW precedent, regarding a brand willfully attempting to violate pollution regulation.

Let’s hope this guy exposing the willful fraud of Porsche cheat-to-harm culture is going to bring them to bear in ways that will save thousands of lives or more.