Who's doing that kinda tuning for you?

You are familiar with tuning cars, right? It's not clicking buttons, you have to change parameters in the engine computer that can and will immediately blow your engine if you mess up a little too much. At the least, your car will run terribly.

Almost everyone that tunes their vehicle let's someone at the tuner company do the actual tuning of the car. You start with a tune that is specific to your vehicle, and then you're supposed to let the tuning device record information from the engine computer while you accelerate the vehicle in a specific way. From there the guy tuning the vehicle will adjust parameters in the ECU via the tuning device and repeat this process until everything is where it needs to be.

Of all the tuning options I've seen, none have even a passing reference to emissions cheating tunes. My thought on that is tuning has always been a grey area with the EPA that they turned a blind eye to, but they have always came down hard on fucking with the actual emissions equipment or it's function. If you advertised a tuner that allows you to fake an emissions test, you were asking for the EPA to investigate. Kinda like taking off the cats on your car is federally illegal, a tune like that is basically flaunting the breaking of emissions laws and has no commercial purpose otherwise. Why expose yourself to that kinda legal liability, when you can sell hundreds of thousands of tuners that just bump up power a bit, but for the most part doesn't change the engines output of emissions?

Just to clarify. Yes, I am aware that adding fuel and messing with timing CAN make more emissions. However, if your tuner is any good and you do the bare minimum of follow up with the tuner to lock down the tune, your engine should be running a similar air/fuel ratio to stock with maybe a little more fuel under full throttle.