is modified cars significant ?
I certainly know there are some, clowns who fit stupid exhausts and modify the engines so they rapidly back fire like a drive by shooting. (i would remove all of their licences) but in the grand scheme of thing these numbers with be insignificant - or is there a different type of modification going on that is not so obvious
I'm thinking deleting adBlue and boring a hole through the DPF no longer happened
To varying extends, I think so. The simplest is blocking off EGR valves. Really common on elderly diesels that smoke a bit. Obviously, it reduces the amount of crankcase fumes they're supposed to burn, which reduces the smoke a bit, at the expense of increasing NOx emissions. However, as the MOT gas analysers can't measure NOx and discovering that the valve had been blanked would involve dismantling, it goes largely undetected. I suspect more than half of diesels over 10 years / 100,000 miles might have had this done. Later ones throw up a fault code and warning light, which would be an MOT fail, but there are plenty of places that can "map this out" for you.
Yes, the "Pops 'n Bangs" remaps to make you think you're driving a rally car, do of course degrade emissions performance and noise compliance, and yes, I'd guess it's a fairly small percentage of the overall car fleet, but that's a bit like saying it's only a relatively small percentage drive round on bald tyres - we still ought to do something about it, I think.
Because the industry is largely underground, it's really hard to put a number on how many affected vehicles there might be, but looking at the number of adverts for companies offering such services, there must be a large number to keep that many of them in business?
And then yes, the people who "de-cat" or "DPF delete" or fit "AdBlue emulators". There are plenty of those out there too. My gut feeling, is that it's a bigger proportion that we might think - maybe 25% of cars over 5 years old? But that's a wild guess that I'd be hard-put to defend!