I drove my car today

That is odd. There is no document necessary to obtain an emission test in Nevada, I receive my renewal notices via email, I don’t have a printer to produce the notice and an inspector can not demand to see a renewal notice.

If someone is buying or selling a vehicle what document do they need to be eligible for an emissions test?

The objective is to remove old polluting vehicles from the road, not to see all vehicles pass, that would defeat the purpose of the program. If you only have 4 days left to pass the test you can still drive the vehicle to a repair shop, if the plates have expired the vehicle can be towed.

Here in Oakland registration seems to be an option anyway. I’m not real sympathetic to people who wait until the last minute and then expect the whole system to accommodate them. The phrase is “You snooze, you lose.”

It’s different in Calif. No registration renewal document, no test.

Don’t know, never had to do that. I believe that the DMV requires a car to have passed an emissions test before it can be sold however, or at least before they will process the title change. Not sure how recent the emissions test has to be though. The onus for passing the emissions test is on the seller, not the buyer.

No disagreement. I’m not advocating for a lenient test at all. The test should do what it intends to do. And there has to be deadlines. But there needs to be some common sense too. In my way of thinking as long the owner takes the test by the due date and pays their registration fee by its due date, if the first test fails, they could still drive the car & get another 4 weeks to take another test is all. You could argue thenn they’d be driving a polluting car for another 4 weeks, but the counter-argument is the alternative could well be worse: they might be driving an even more polluting car instead. When this situation happened to me I was forced to bench my electronic fuel injected Corolla with cat that nearly passed, and drive my 70’s carb’ed truck w/o cat instead. I expect the truck’s emissions are 10 times the Corolla’s. Don’t know b/c the truck is emissions testing exempt. Forcing the Corolla off the road for those 4 weeks increased pollution, not decreased it.

Here in WA, it’s the buyer. But if the seller gives you a copy of the last test, and it’s less then 1 year old, that will be acceptable to register the car. This is also the last year for pollution testing in WA,.