It's a bit more complicated than that, based on my experience...
If you buy a California vehicle and pick it up in California, you pay California sales tax.
If you buy a California vehicle and ship it to your home state, you pay your home state's sales tax.
Registration (title and tags) is always your home state's rates.
Please correct me if I am wrong here but this was the situation when I last bought an Internet vehicle...
Yeah California is one of those places that will take whatever money they can get their hands on. You can buy a new car in another state and bring it here and only pay CA tax but not the other way around.




