California In A Nutshell

Your chances of getting caught in a CARB truck check are very small. They usually set up at open scales or sometimes in rest areas. If they're up everybody will be talking about it on the CB.
They seldom work nights or weekends and I've never seen them out in rainy or cold weather.
That being said, if you do get caught you'll wish you never came to California. The fines and penalties are huge.

 

And those are enforceable how?

Is CARB able to flag registrations or something?

 

I'm not really sure. The few times that we've been inspected we passed and got a little sticker along with a paper showing the inspection details.
The way I understand it if you don't pass you're issued a citation. To get the citation cleared you have to show proof of correction, kind of like a fixit ticket.
The CARB inspectors have access to DMV files but I don't know how that would work with out of state trucks.
I've heard that if an out of stater gets inspected and fails that there really isn't much they can do to demand correction. If the truck goes out of California and never gets corrected I don't think they can do anything. But..if the truck comes back into California there's a data base that will show non compliance. I wouldn't want to be that guy.
Like I said, I really don't know a lot of this for sure. It's just what I hear and what little I've learned from the CARB guys themselves.
One thing everybody agrees on is that the fines for non-compliance are brutal.