California-legal Skylines Now Available!

Image credit: International Vehicle Importers

I discussed a while back in a previous post about how California had special laws that made registering a Skyline there incredibly difficult. Because the California Air Resources Board or CARB requires cars made after 1974 to meet California's stricter emissions requirements the R32 needs special modifications and then expensive testing to be certified as legal in the Golden State even if it's exempted from EPA regulations by virtue of its age. Nobody at the time of my post had figured out the exact process yet to get a Skyline CARB-legalized or offered a service to owners for getting their car's certified - that's now changed.

When I bought my Nismo at the start of the year from International Vehicle Importers in California, Sean Morris, the owner of IVI, gave us a tour of the premises and showed us a few other R32s that they had imported including a car they were modifying to make California legal. They were still in the middle of the process but he told me at the time about how they had needed to fit new catalytic converters and they were waiting for the testing to be done to validate the mods they made. Since a few people I had talked to were very interested in how to get a Skyline legalized for California I asked Sean a few weeks ago how it had gone with their project. He told me at the time that the mods were successful and he was just waiting for the final paperwork to arrive before announcing it to the world.

Well, that time's come and Sean just posted the news on his blog a couple of days ago:

http://www.gtrusablog.com/2015/11/first-california-legal-nissan-skyline.html 

This means that now you can contact IVI and buy an R32 from them that they'll get certified as California-legal or have your car converted by them. They also say that now that they've established the process they can do the same for other JDM cars. Although it costs quite a bit of money to do the conversion given the necessary mods and the price of testing, all of this is great news for us Skyline fans because it's one more hurdle that's been overcome in legalizing these cars in the States. With R33s being able to be imported legally again maybe someday our elected leaders will see the light and relax the 25-year import restriction so we can have R33s and R34s sooner. Now wouldn't that be the greatest thing since all-day breakfast McMuffins?