Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Re: He wants to sue me for SMOG test on a sold car

For most types of cases (including yours), the legislature increased the amount of a small claims court judgment to $7,500.00.

Although I couldn't locate the statute itself to review the language, the website for California's Bureau of Automotive Repair summarized the time requirements for providing a smog certificate upon the sale of a vehicle, as follows:

"California law requires a seller of a vehicle to provide the buyer with a valid Smog Check certification at the time of the sale or transfer. Smog certifications obtained for the purpose of title transfer or vehicle sale, are good for 90 days from the date of issuance.

A smog check is not required on a title or pink slip transfer if the vehicle's biennial smog certification was submitted to DMV within 60 days prior to the transfer date.

Smog certifications for the purposes of vehicle registration or title transfer are not required for any motor vehicle that is four or less model years old."

You may want to look up the statutes yourself if any of the above statements apply to your particular situation. You can search California Statutes at this website:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/calawquery

Use whatever search terms apply to your query and search only the Vehicle Code, Business & Professions Code and the Health and Saftey Code (rather than all of California Code Volumes), by checking the boxes next to these three particular volumes.

It will take you some time to wade through the over-lapping code sections to figure out which statutes apply to the facts of your transactions. It sounds like the issue in your case is not whether you timely provided a smog certificate (even though it appears you did), but whether or not the buyer smoged the car himself, discovered it wouldn't pass, and had to repair the head gasket in order to get the car to pass smog. You paid for that repair, and if that fixed the problem, I fail to understand why the buyer would have any right to rescind the entire contract. The Vehicle Code provides (in certain instances) for the seller to pay for repairs necessary to get a vehicle to pass smog; it makes this requirement in lieu, it seems to me, of providing that a contract for the sale of a vehicle is void if the car won't smog.

good luck