Reply to "Any GT5-S owners in California?"

Really interesting topic. The legal ownership issue is an interesting slight of hand (sorry if this is off topic on smogging but it may be very relevant and ties into the Montana titling of a car by the Ferrari owners).

I owned a large boat a few years back in partnership with three other buddies (kinda like a timeshare), we owned the boat in a Delaware corporation for liability issues in case one of the partners had an accident with the boat the liability wouldn't flow to all of us personally, the injured party could sue the corporation but the only asst was the boat. When a "documented vessel" is purchased in California there is a large Use Tax that the state hits you for and to avoid it many boat owners were taking newly purchased boats out of the country, parking them in a marina in Mexico for 6+ months, then bring the boat back into the country and avoid this tax...it was a very substantial $$ amount like 8 or 9% of the boats value. When we sold this boat, all we did was sell the shares/stock of the corporation to the new owner...and to our surprise since the boats ownership didn't change (it stayed in the corporation) the new owner didn't have to pay the California documented vessel use tax...we never intended this to happen when we put the ownership of the boat in the Delaware corporation. Of course the new owner was ecstatic because he just got an 8-9% reduction in his total cost to purchase the boat.

Here's possibly the Ferrari owners fix...register the car in Montana...possibly they don't require a home address for a property in that state to do registration...get a PO Box and register the car to that address, meet Montana requirements for registering the car, pay their annual registration fees, but drive the car here in California legally with plates and registration from Montana or another state? One of my neighbors had all his cars registered in New Mexico at the hotel he owned there. He saved on annual registration fees and insurance by doing this. He did it for at least 15 years that I know of.