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Thought I’d chime in because I have experience with this. To anyone wondering how it works it’s like this.
If the car doesn’t have a check engine light while it has been driven catless, the car was clearly tuned and will not pass most state inspections because the sensors that get checked will show up as either “off” or “not ready”.
Simply installing the cats doesn’t take care of this. The car needs to be flashed back to stock. I could be wrong about this but I believe tuners can lock the pcm so you could run into problems there. If not most dealers can simply flash the pcm back to stock.
Now you run into the issue of the car not running right after it got flashed back to stock due to having aftermarket parts on it that require a tune.
Let’s say in the op’s example there are no aftermarket parts on it aside from the catless exhaust. After the dealer installs the oem cats and flashes the computer back to stock, the op would have to drive the car a certain amount of miles within a certain way (this is called a vehicle specific drive cycle) For the sensors to show up as “on” and “ready”. Only then will it pass emissions.
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