Comment by MikeTheGreat

2 days ago

> No automotive paint shops

Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.

They routinely painted cars.

They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!

That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.

And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.

It’s not claiming: you can’t have an automotive paint shop. It’s claiming you can’t start a new paint shop. Specifically, if you don’t have one for your car manufacturing line already, you can’t set one up. Wikipedia shows 13 pages for auto plants in CA. Most of them have the verb “was” in the opening sentence. There are two current plants: Tesla Fremont and Toyota California. Both of these plants are over 50 years old, and only one of them produces actual cars instead of parts.

  • Firstly, an auto paint shop is not the same as an auto manufacturing plant.

    Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...

    So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?

  • It's claiming you can't get a permit to release VOCs into the air, but the GP comment describes a setup that apparently is designed to paint cars while preventing VOCs getting released into the air, so that you can still paint cars in California.

The website is extremely clear about this being about _new_ automotive paint shops, so nothing you said here refutes the website.

  • He doesn’t need to refute it he just needs to offer an alternate claim.

    The site provides no citations, no evidence, so there’s no need to defend the count argument or honestly even make it.

    The sit isn’t just false, it is flat out disrespectful to all the workers, engineers, founders, and everyone else involved in the industries he says don’t exist that actually do exist. The site is basically “I think this is hard so no one else could possibly do it”.

They're likely falling under some "we aren't selling car painting as a service or main part of our business, we're painting our own cars as a small ancillary part of our real business" exemption.

  • Sounds like the "llantera" model you see out west. There's about 10x the number of them that would actually be needed just to change tires.