[xj_man_646]

Originally Posted by 6DoF

it's possible to get a carb'd vehicle to pass today's emissions regulations ... you just have to hand tune every one coming off the line for the exact environment that it'll be driven. EFI was just easier to do it, and offered more consistent performance for the customer over longer periods of time.

Originally Posted by Dennis

Exactly. Carbs give you power, can give you tons of power, they just can't be made to give you consistent maintenance-free power. Fuel injections was inevitable, but regulations speed up the process and pointed it in a good directions.

You would be VERY hard pressed to get a carbureted vehicle to meet emissions today. The HC and NOx emissions standards are so close to zero that the level of AFR control required to meet the standards is unattainable with a carb.

This is, literally, the reason EFI became a thing.

In the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S. and Japan, the respective federal governments imposed increasingly strict exhaust emission regulations. During that time period, the vast majority of gasoline-fueled automobile and light truck engines did not use fuel injection. To comply with the new regulations, automobile manufacturers often made extensive and complex modifications to the engine carburetor(s). While a simple carburetor system is cheaper to manufacture than a fuel injection system, the more complex carburetor systems installed on many engines in the 1970s were much more costly than the earlier simple carburetors. To more easily comply with emissions regulations, automobile manufacturers began installing fuel injection systems in more gasoline engines during the late 1970s.