California’s collector-car smog bill is once again sitting in the same room where its predecessor died, and the reason has almost nothing to do with tailpipes.
Senators Dave Cortese (D-San José) and Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) staged a rally on 10th Street outside the Capitol on Wednesday morning, August 12, with 15 to 20 classic and collectible vehicles parked out front. The advisory listed Cortese, Grove, Pasadena Classic Car owner Carmen Vera, and SEMA state government affairs manager Victor Munoz. The timing wasn’t sentimental: Senate Bill 1392 — statutorily titled Jay Leno’s Law — landed on the Assembly Appropriations suspense file on August 5, and the legislative calendar gives fiscal committees until August 14 to move anything at all. After that, it’s floor sessions only through the August 31 adjournment.
This bill has been running clean laps everywhere else. It passed the Senate on May 19 and cleared Assembly Transportation 13-0 on June 29. Last year’s version, SB 712, died on this exact suspense file. Leno, the bill’s sponsor, said at reintroduction that he was “very excited about it” and that a lot of bills don’t pass on the first go-around.
What the bill actually does, and where the fine print bites
Read past the headline number and the mechanism is more interesting than “1981 cars get a pass.”
California already exempts everything built before the 1976 model year outright. That’s a fixed date, courtesy of AB 2683 (Lieber, 2004), which killed the 30-year rolling exemption SB 42 (Kopp) had created in 1997. Separately, there’s a partial exemption most owners of qualifying cars don’t fully understand: a collector-insured vehicle at least 35 model years old skips the visual and functional inspection of emission control devices — the catalytic converter check, the underhood hardware audit — but still has to pass the tailpipe test, the fuel cap functional test, and the liquid-fuel-leak inspection. The Senate Transportation Committee’s own analysis is blunt about why that visual check exists: older emissions systems are simple enough that they’re easy to tamper with for performance.
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SB 1392 replaces that partial pass with a full exemption for pre-1981 collector cars, then adds one model year every January starting in 2028 until the exemption reaches vehicles built before the 1986 model year in 2032.
Here’s the part nobody is putting on a press release. The June 24 Assembly amendment quietly widened the bill. The Bureau of Automotive Repair’s spring newsletter, summarizing the April version, described the relief as biennial inspection only. The current text amends Vehicle Code section 4000.1 as well, adding collector cars to the list of transfers that don’t require a certificate. That means the exemption now covers initial registration and change of ownership too. For anyone buying a 1979 Trans Am in California, that is the single most consequential line in the bill.
And the definition itself has a trapdoor. Amended Vehicle Code section 259 offers three doors into “collector motor vehicle”: a car at least 35 model years old that either carries collector insurance on file with DMV or is determined through a DMV process to be driven under 1,000 miles a year; a historical vehicle under section 5004; or a special interest vehicle under section 5051. But every one of the new smog exemption paragraphs cross-references paragraph (1) of subdivision (a) only. Historical plates and special-interest status get you the definition — not the exemption. You still need the insurance or the mileage finding, plus the use test: shows, parades, charitable functions, historical exhibitions, and not your primary mode of transportation.
Also worth noting: the 35-model-year floor is decorative here. By 2027 that captures everything through 1992. The real gates are the insurance policy and the use test, both of which the owner asserts.
The suspense file isn’t about smog. It’s about a fund going broke.
The Senate Appropriations analysis is where this story actually lives, and it reads less like an air quality fight than a budget triage memo.
The smog certificate fee is $8.25. BAR data cited in the analysis shows roughly 108,000 vehicles from model years 1976 through 1985 were tested over a two-year window, with about 23,000 — 21 percent — failing. Even at a 50 percent uptake rate, the committee’s illustrative revenue loss to the Vehicle Inspection and Repair Fund starts around $95,000 and grows to roughly $223,000 by full phase-in. That is rounding error against a fund holding a $140 million reserve.
The problem is on the other side of the ledger. DMV would need one-time IT work in the mid- to high hundreds of thousands of dollars to add a collector-vehicle certification path across online, mail, kiosk, and counter channels, plus ongoing workload in the low hundreds of thousands annually to process the waivers. The bill contains no fee to recover any of it. That cost falls on the Motor Vehicle Account, which has run a structural deficit since 2021-22 — roughly $60 million in the current year, a projected $112 million in the budget year — and which the Governor’s 2026-27 budget summary says could be insolvent as soon as 2028-29.
DMV further told the committee it couldn’t finish the programming before the bill’s January 1, 2027 operative date, because the vehicle registration piece of its Digital eXperience Platform modernization isn’t scheduled to roll out until fall 2026, and this work isn’t in that project’s scope.
Then there’s CARB, which estimated about $1.59 million a year and 7.2 staff positions to build a test program, remodel air quality data, and revise federally required plans if the exemption creates a measurable hole. Smog check is a State Implementation Plan measure for federal ozone and particulate standards, so lost reductions have to be found somewhere.
The opposition’s technical case is the CAPCOA letter reproduced in the Transportation analysis, and it’s the most cited number in this whole fight: a 1982 passenger car with 43 years of expected deterioration emits roughly 123 times the NOx of a new 2025 car. Drive it 3,000 miles a year and CAPCOA pegs the equivalent at 369,000 miles of a modern car. At the 7,500-mile ceiling of a typical collector policy, they get to 922,500.
SEMA’s counter, also in the record, is infrastructure collapse: BAR’s own 2025 presentation found more than 87 percent of smog stations perform one or fewer BAR-97 tests per day, over half do one or fewer per week, and 44 percent of STAR stations said they’d retire the equipment entirely if certification stopped requiring it. As BAR migrates 1996-99 vehicles to OIS testing, demand for legacy dyno equipment drops further. This is the argument that should worry owners most, because it’s happening whether or not SB 1392 passes.
What this means if you own one of these cars
Do not confuse an inspection exemption with permission to modify. SB 1392 doesn’t touch anti-tampering law, and it doesn’t touch the emissions standards your car was certified to. It removes the check, not the rule.
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Also read the exemption structure carefully: the out-of-cycle and remote-sensing testing hooks in Health and Safety Code section 44011 are written into the newer-vehicle exemption paragraph and apply to vehicles excepted “by this paragraph.” They aren’t replicated in the new collector paragraphs. That’s a drafting detail that will matter if this becomes law.
For buyers, the transfer exemption cuts both ways. A required smog test is a cheap, independent look at whether a 1980 Corvette still has its catalyst, its air injection plumbing, and a functioning EGR valve. Remove it from the transaction and you’ve removed a free inspection. Budget for a real pre-purchase inspection instead, and pull the smog history before you wire money.
On insurance: qualifying almost certainly means moving to a collector policy, which typically brings mileage caps, garaging requirements, and a separate daily driver. If your 1984 El Camino is what you take to work, you’re not eligible, and self-certifying otherwise creates a paper trail you’d rather not have.
Market-wise, the pre-1976 cutoff has quietly shaped California values for two decades — 1976 through 1985 cars have carried a discount here that they don’t carry in Arizona or Nevada. If the phase-in survives to 2032, expect that gap to compress, and expect early Fox-body Mustangs, C3 Corvettes, G-body Regals, and third-gen F-bodies to be the ones that move.
Cortese, for what it’s worth, owns three classic cars — all of them already exempt under the pre-1976 rule.
Images Via: Wikipedia