[Historybuff]

I was told that one method in Calif. allows you to register the car by the year of the block. Which is why those junkyards in Montana with thousands of engines (the rest of the cars rusted away) do good business selling blocks with a i.d. number for that year and a bill of sale verifying the year. Which , unaccountably, California lets you then transfer that same number onto a new replacement block, maybe even one made of aluminum instead of cast iron. So basically you can have a new Cobra built in 2007 but still title it as a 1965 car if you have the receipt for a '65 block. I think this is crazy, in a way, because it flaunts all logic. It probably started innocently enough with dune buggies (yes theee were dune buggies before the VW ones) and other dunes rods where they threw them together of scrap iron but didn't know what year to title it so when the DMV was asked they asked "what car contributed the biggest chunk?" and when the reply was "the engine," that was the year they chose. Where it annoys me most is when auction companies like the ones at Monterey advertise in their catalogs "1965 Cobra" you plow through 1,000 words of copy before they admit it is a Superformance or some other replica. I would say the way to eliminate all this false alarms for car searchers is to title it by the year it was first registered i.e. "2007 Superformance. replica of 1965 Cobra."

The result of letting all those replica owners register their assembled cars as real Cobras was that now the real Cobras are lost among them. Oh, well, at least we have the real CSX numbers to go by. But, guess what, some States lett you arbitrarily pluck a number out of the air for the chassis number too.(as someone I hard of did with a kit GT40, choosing a number that would fall into the real GT40 number range...)

If a car is sold as a 1965 car when in fact not a single part of it was built
in 1965, it sounds like grand larceny to me. I'm no lawyer but isn't that a felony?

As far as California making it rough for fun car owners; I think it shows the bi-polar nature of the state government. Thousands of tourists come here to see car races, visit car shops, buy high performance car parts, shop for exotic cars, yet the State government wastes time and money consistently trying to seek new ways to hobble or kill off the most interesting parts of the car hobby, which is as a whole an industry is one that employs thousands and pays MILLIONS in taxes to the State (couldn't resist the capitalization...sorry, I get carried away)