i live in California and collect old (literally: project, mostly european) cars. The Cal DMV are a nightmare to deal with despite the vibrant local car culture which is slowly dying for all but the rich due to the DMV and other bureaucracy. There is a fee and a form every time you exhale, it's getting worse and you have wait hours to be charged at their offices.

Maybe the goal is just to get people to skirt the law and accept the legal ambiguity hanging over their head that comes with that? They're basically saying "fine, be a small time car flipper if you want but know that you are giving the state the authority to destroy your life at any time on whim". This is what police states that want to have the power of arbitrary enforcement do.

I'm not saying CA is there yet but if you look at asinine policies from all the various states and their level of compliance it seems pretty clear that huge swaths of "perfectly fine when done reasonably" normal and common behaviors are more or less impossible to do while being legally in the clear. At what point does an unenforceable at scale policy become a backhanded infringement upon people's property rights?

Reminds me of exactly the way the legal cannabis trade has gone in Canada.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/18/cannabis-can...

Stupidly high fees and requirements for production or sale licences, no real legal way to acquire initial stock, countless hoops to jump through and continuous fees, over top the exorbitant tax rates have made it fairly difficult for anyone without a lot of initial capital to even begin.

Despite the fact there was already and still is a thriving underground grey market that gets mostly left alone until somebody needs to be made an example of.

Also an older euro car fan, no longer a CA resident. What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I know post 75 cars have to be smogged with factory equipment if using the stock engine (though I don’t know how the hell your average smog tech knows the factory setup for an 1980 Lancia Beta).

I had to sell my old euro car (to an out-of-stater) when I moved to CA because despite miraculously meeting strict CA smog guidelines it never had to meet in its decades of existence, it had non-approved (i.e. $CA stamped$) parts in it and failed the "visual". Clean-blowing, perfectly functional car, had to sell it anyway. I'm still bitter.

you have to prep carefully for the visual...

>What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I've never done one for CA but some states make it hell to go from "car with no paperwork last owned by a dead person and last registered years ago" to "car with proper paperwork to sell/register" so for someone repairing old cars to flip that can cause a significant headache.

I literally get cars from junkyards with no paperwork. Example: a wrecked, rare 76 Jaguar xj6C coupe with no paperwork, plates, keys. You have to trailer it to the police station for verification, show bill of sale etc etc, then go through months of DMV forms and fees which typically require a professional who does this bureaucracy, otherwise you will spend tens of hours waiting to go to a DMV window to be given the next hurdles to jump over. Transferring titles from purchased out of state cars is painful too. The smog issues are relatively straight forward in comparison.