The car industry has a new ultimatum for the most populous state in the country: let us off the hook, or we’ll take our showrooms and go home. In a stunning bit of brinkmanship, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation—the lobbying group that speaks for General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and basically every major automaker selling vehicles in the United States—warned on June 23 that car companies may be forced to halt sales of both new and used vehicles in California starting July 1 unless lawmakers hit the brakes on a vehicle-tracking law.
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Yes, you read that correctly. Rather than build a working “off switch” for the connected-car tracking tech baked into modern vehicles, the industry is floating the nuclear option of simply not selling cars in a state that moves something like two million of them a year. Bold strategy.
So what is this law, anyway?
The flashpoint is SB 1394, a 2024 California law aimed squarely at one of the creepier side effects of the connected car: stalking. Modern vehicles are rolling surveillance devices, packed with GPS, always-on data connections and apps that let a phone track a car’s location or control it remotely. That’s genuinely useful right up until the person holding the phone is an abuser using it to hunt down a partner who’s trying to escape.
SB 1394 requires automakers to give drivers—especially domestic-violence survivors—a clear, fast process to submit a restraining order or similar documentation and have location-tracking and remote access cut off or transferred away from an abuser. In other words, an in-car tracking off switch for the people who need it most. Hard to argue with the goal.
The industry’s beef isn’t the goal—it’s the deadline
To hear the Alliance tell it, automakers already comply with the core abuse-survivor protections. Their complaint is the timeline. They say they can’t realistically stand up the required process across every make, model and connected-services platform by the compliance deadline, and they want it pushed back. The vehicle for that delay is SB 719, a bill that would punt the deadline—reportedly all the way to July 2027.
“Without SB 719 being signed into law before July 1, there is substantial risk that auto sales in California will be suspended,” the Alliance’s Curt Magleby warned, in the kind of sentence designed to make a state legislator’s blood run cold.
Whether that’s a genuine compliance crisis or a high-stakes game of chicken depends on who you ask. Critics will note that the law has been on the books since 2024, which is a long runway to build a feature that, at its core, amounts to a button that says “stop sharing my location.”
A familiar pattern
If you’ve been paying attention to the connected-car beat, this fight should feel familiar. Automakers have spent the last few years getting caught with their hands in the data jar, and regulators have been circling. Earlier this year the FTC moved to restrict how GM handles driver data after finding driving-behavior information had been collected and sold to insurers. Meanwhile, the same data the industry says is too hard to switch off is valuable enough that Toyota has explored literally paying owners for it.
The throughline is simple: the car knows where you are, who’s driving, and how, and untangling that web turns out to be inconvenient the moment someone asks the industry to hand control back to the driver.
What happens next
For now, this is a threat, not a reality. The likeliest outcome is that Sacramento blinks and passes some version of SB 719 to delay the deadline, because the alternative—a state where you can’t legally buy a new or used car—is a political non-starter for everyone involved. But the fact that the industry is willing to wave around a statewide sales freeze as leverage tells you exactly how much it values control of your car’s data. We’ll be watching to see who flinches first.
Sources
- Reuters — Automakers could halt car sales in California without delay in vehicle tracking law
- Alliance for Automotive Innovation — Automakers Warn Vehicle Sales in California at Risk
- Jalopnik — Automakers Could Stop Selling Cars In California Rather Than Comply With Tracking Laws
- Road & Track — All New and Used Car Sales in California Could Be Halted on July 1st
- Politico — California Climate (SB 719 delay coverage)