I'm in the military stationed in this state with a s197 Mustang GT registered to Florida...

I'm in the military stationed in this state with a s197 Mustang GT registered to Florida. I want to sell it to buy a GT350 but here's the thing - my car isn't smog legal here. It's been registered to Florida for a year and a half so I've never done anything to get it smog approved here. I have long tube headers, catted x pipe and a cai along with detroit rocker cams. I really don't want to take all of my shit out and buy OEM stuff to put in.

I don't want to sell it to a dealer because I'll get jack shit for it - I want to sell it to a private party but is it legal to sell my car with all this stuff on it so long as I list it?

What are my options?

Look on Craigslist for GT partouts or ebay

I just don't want to go through the trouble of taking out the headers man.

That shit took me and my brother 3 days to do when we were 19. Camshafts took 2 days.

Ask friends and family with modders cars if the know where you can get passed in smog

This. Or find someone who doesn't care.

There's plenty of guys on base who can hook me up but I don't want the guy I sell my car coming back and complaining or getting me into a legal shithole.

Maybe you can sell it to someone that is moving? I got lucky and sold my old SI (registered in FL, no cat) to someone in the Navy that had orders to Mayport.

Hmmm.. That's an option but it might take a while. I need a new car like now man.

Sell it military. As is. If the dumb fucker tries to register it as a California car as a civilian that's his fucking fault.

Or just sell it to some one in a smog exempt county.

Sell it to Catstang

Or some other dumb fuck that will buy it outright. He'll go get the title transfered, get the smog check flag, no longer your problem.

California is so bad you can't have a modified exhaust with cats? Fuck that shithole. Like I thought you guys were kidding about that stuff. That's messed up!

Maybe get used (cheap) parts to make it smog legal, sell as is + parts if they want to make it smog legal.

it's not messed up m8 I don't think you wanna walk around in yellow poisoned fog... sometimes they have laws to protect you

Not that user, and I get what you are saying, but CA does go a bit overboard. It would be such a great place to live if it wasn't for some of the weird shit going on over there.

You can modify the exhaust however you want as long as it passes the sniffer (older cars) or sets the monitors (newer cars).

put the car in neutral and shove it off a cliff, no one's going to think you lied when you say someone stole it. you're a soldier

op don't actually shove your car off a cliff, they'll send you to leavenworth for a loong looong time. i have to say this because some of you soldiers are actually that stupid to go through with it

CA law requires you as the seller to smog if buyer will register in a county that requires smog. That said, if you advertise you're selling as-is and car won't smog, most people don't know this and will just say OK. Other options I can think of are to sell to someone who lives in county like Humboldt that doesn't require smog. Or consider selling it to someone in Oregon or Nevada. They don't require smog either. Or find someone who will do the 200 dollar "smog"

Not quite. Smog tech will look under your car to see if the cats are there as part of the visual inspection. If they're missing, he won't even do the sniffer test, just fail the car for no cats. Also, it's 1999 and older cars that still do sniffer and dyno test. 2000 and later they check OBD2 sensors and make sure all drive cycle triggers have been tripped. Visual inspection is done no matter what the age of car

Your ideas from what you've read are not the same as what happens in real life

You can modify your exhaust as long as it's after the cats. Modding anything upstream of and including the cats is a no-no unless the parts have a CARB executive order saying they're smog legal

If your smog tech isn't doing a visual for cats, he isn't doing what he's supposed to. Lucky for you if you're not running cats. Bad for him if BAR ever catches up with him on it.

Take it to a place that'll smog it, but you throw them some extra cash and they pass it

If the car didn't have cats it wouldn't pass the sniffer. If it was a read only then the monitors wouldn't set if the car didn't have cats (unless it has an elbow for the o2 sensor or a simulator, which they can't be expected to see anyway, car could just as easily have hollowed out or dummy cats, it's not a $15/hr smog techs job to tear a car apart looking for forensic evidence). Most test only shops don't even have a lift, and there is no shop that's going to pull off an underbody cover to look around, check a header for carb legality, or interpret the already passing numbers and determine somethings wrong, it just doesn't happen especially on the later cars.

I hear ya and I generally agree. BAR knows this too, which is why they occasionally audit smog shops with an undercover car.

I'm just cautioning what is supposed to happen. OP might run into a smog tech who does it strictly by the book, he might not. You don't know unless you've been to that shop before and gotten that particular tech before