The question here is about removing cats. Easy answer: don’t. I’m sure there are many other ways to reduce emissions, like drive less. But that’s not the question.
Lets see if I understand this increase in vehicles. The world has more people , mass transit is just not good enough for many people to get to work or handle shift work , many families just have go different directions for work and at least a hundred other reasons why there are more vehicles.
That’s interesting to know.
That means you also know that the increase in vehicle miles driven over the years has dumped far more pollution into the atmosphere than a handful of vehicle owners removing their cats.
My whole point for jumping in what to put into perspective the added pollution from removing a cat from a car vs the larger factor contributing to vehicle pollution.
No.
People who removed the cat just contributed more pollution into the atmosphere.
Tester.
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Actually wrong. They had a news item about car pollution, and the folks responsible for monitoring pollution with roadside meters found that a large fraction, like half, of the air pollution was caused by a very small number of badly-polluting vehicles. They called them ‘pounders’ because they emitted a pound or more of unburned hydrocarbons per X miles (I don’t remeber the number), an order of magnitude higher than the in-tune cars.
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I think you might be downplaying the ratio a bit calling it a handful. Regardless, once we essentially condone people flouting the laws because they only represent a fraction of the overall population, then that fraction is sure to grow.
Based on your argument, would you consider it acceptable if only a handful of people peed in the pool, especially if you don’t know which ones are doing it? I mean, it’s only a fraction of the water volume… 
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I wasn’t able to find the Dallas study, but similar work was done in Toronto, same basic findings. It’s a minority (often only 5%-10%) of the vehicles that causes a majority of the pollution:
Plume-based analysis of vehicle fleet air pollutant emissions (copernicus.org)
Hi Texases:
I agree with you. But I’m not talking about un-tuned vehicles. There are lots of them and they do pollute.
My comments are referring to the original comment that we should be worried about the OP removing his or her cat because it reduces pollutants released into the air.
Looking at the big picture, I would argue that the large increase in vehicle mileage (both tuned and un-tuned) as a whole, contribute more to pollution than the smaller number who remove their cats.
In climate terms, the added miles helped drive the ongoing rally in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which rebounded by 6.2 percent in 2021 following a pandemic-induced plunge in 2020.
Carbon Monitor, an academic emissions tracking initiative, estimates U.S. CO2 emissions rose by 52 million tons in the first three months of 2022 compared to the same time last year, bringing total American emissions for the quarter to 1.3 billion tons.
OP is cheap? Don’t want to fix bad cats? 70%
OP wants better performance 20%
Unknown? 10%
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If the OP is cheap they need to be driving something other than a top of the line used Lexus.
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From what I can tell, the EPA’s current policy is to not offer rewards to emissions-violations whistleblowers. But not everyone occurs w/that approach.
The various states may or may not offer rewards, don’t know.