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.