B.C.’s AirCare program, which many Metro Vancouver motorists have regarded as a costly headache despite its vaunted role in cutting carbon dioxide emissions, is being phased out.

The provincial government announced Thursday that the 20-year-old AirCare will stop tailpipe testing of light cars and trucks at the end of 2014 and turn its attention to heavy-duty diesel vehicles.

Environment Minister Terry Lake said newer cars are much cleaner now — a point argued over the years by AirCare’s many critics.

“With new technology in cars, what we’re seeing is the incremental benefits to the airshed are smaller and smaller,” Lake said Thursday.

The Environment Ministry has estimated the AirCare program takes 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions out of the lower Fraser Valley airshed every year.

Passenger vehicles are exempt from the program for the first seven model years. Drivers of vehicles manufactured before 1992 pay $23 each year for tests while owners of newer vehicles pay $46 for tests every two years after the seven-year exemption.

Lake called the fees a significant cost to families.

“When governments have programs that are in place, I think it’s responsible to say ‘OK, have we achieved the objective?’ and if we have, let’s phase that out and look at other areas where we can make some better improvements to those objectives,” he said.

AirCare was introduced in 1992 because of warnings from experts that Vancouver’s air quality would be worse than that of Los Angeles by 2010.

There were plenty detractors of the new requirement that drivers demonstrate they had recently passed an emissions test before being given their auto insurance.

Besides costing motorists money in fees and mechanical repairs, the annual or biennial AirCare test was an inconvenience and a source of anxiety for car owners who wondered whether their car would pass the test.

Among those who detested AirCare was Vancouver Sun columnist Doug Sagi who called the new program “AirScare.”

In a 1992 column, Sagi lamented the program was here to stay because the “total scrapping of the silly scheme is ... as doubtful as the emergence of common sense as the dominant rule of human behaviour.”

Sagi said “the fact that it is a stupid program that will have only marginal to minimal effect on motor vehicle pollution is being overlooked.”

A poll conducted for The Sun in 1994 captured the public’s ambivalence over anti-emissions measures. The survey found that 75 per cent of British Columbians wanted tougher anti-air pollution laws and nearly 84 per cent of respondents were willing to pay more for cars with higher emissions standards.

But only 65 per cent wanted AirCare to remain in place.

The government-mandated program drew the ire of the Fraser Institute which urged the province to scrap it, calling it a waste of money.

The right-wing think-tank estimated in a 1998 study that AirCare cost $63 million a year in tests, fees, repair costs, expenses and lost time, while only reducing emissions that would cause $500,000 worth of damage annually.