Jay Leno’s Law reads like the biggest favor Sacramento has done for classic car owners in decades. It isn’t, not really. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1392 this week at Leno’s Burbank garage, the same warehouse eclectic enough that its owner once had to register as an arms dealer just to accept a delivery, and the headlines will call it a smog-check exemption for old cars. What it actually is: a ten-model-year window, built with a start date, an end date, and a price tag, engineered so California can hand car collectors a win without loosening its grip on the much bigger fight over what comes out of every other tailpipe in the state.
SB 1392, jointly authored by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) and Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), phases in a full smog-check exemption for vehicles built between 1976 and 1985. It doesn’t happen all at once. Starting January 1, 2028, cars built before the 1981 model year qualify, provided they’re insured as collector vehicles. One additional model year gets added every following January 1, until the window finally reaches 1985 model-year cars on January 1, 2033.
There are two ways to qualify, and they don’t open at the same time. Insurance as a collector vehicle unlocks the exemption starting in 2028. The alternative path, proving a car is driven fewer than 1,000 miles a year, doesn’t become available until 2030, and the bill leaves the actual verification method to the Bureau of Automotive Repair, which still has to write it. California is comfortable exempting a car based on an insurance policy right away. Trusting an odometer took two extra years of rulemaking room.
That gap matters more than it sounds. California’s classic-car paperwork already has a habit of turning into its own ordeal, as one owner learned after a stolen 1971 Chevelle resurfaced 33 years later and simply proving it legally existed again took months. A brand-new mileage-verification system that doesn’t exist yet is exactly the kind of bureaucratic soft spot that tends to produce those stories.
The exemption isn’t free, either. The same bill lets the Bureau of Automotive Repair charge an administrative fee for enrolling a vehicle, capped at twice the state’s existing smog abatement fee, which the California DMV currently lists at $20 a year. Owners could end up paying up to $40 annually for the paperwork proving they don’t have to pay for a smog check.
This also isn’t the bill Leno originally wanted. He stood with Grove outside the Capitol in April 2025 pushing SB 712, a proposal that would have created a permanent, rolling exemption for any collector vehicle at least 35 years old, with the cutoff moving forward automatically every year, the way similar exemptions already work in other states. That bill failed, a fight The Auto Wire covered in detail as it happened. SB 1392 is the compromise that survived: a fixed band of model years, 1976 through 1985, that stops growing once it reaches 1986. A 1987 Buick GNX or a 1988 Mustang GT will not age into this exemption in 2034, or in any year after. Someone will need to write another law for that.
There’s an irony buried in which decade of cars just caught a break. 1976 through 1985 covers roughly the American auto industry’s most smog-strangled years, when federal catalytic-converter mandates landed faster than engineers could make them work well, and horsepower cratered along with it. These are not, by any modern measure, clean-burning cars. They qualify for the exemption not because they pollute less, but because the surviving examples are driven so rarely that the state has decided the math doesn’t matter. California’s smog check program has always cared more about high-mileage gross polluters than about vintage for its own sake. This bill just made that priority explicit.
Zoom out and the timing makes more sense. In the same press release announcing Jay Leno’s Law, the Governor’s office noted that California has now logged 2.5 million zero-emission vehicle sales, and it reiterated the state’s defense of Advanced Clean Cars II, the regulation requiring 100% of new passenger vehicles sold in California to be zero-emission by the 2035 model year, against a federal attempt to revoke the waiver that lets California set its own vehicle emissions rules. Newsom signed an executive order over that fight in June 2025. Against that backdrop, a narrowly tailored exemption for a small, aging, lightly driven slice of the vehicle fleet costs the state almost nothing in real air-quality terms, while buying goodwill with a car-collecting constituency that isn’t uniformly excited about electrification mandates. Call it legislative theater with real paperwork attached. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just worth naming.
Newsom didn’t sign this alone. The same event produced a bill creating a specialized lowrider license plate and another aimed at speeding up state review of aftermarket parts. Pairing a smog exemption for Malaise-era muscle cars with a cultural win for lowrider owners on the same afternoon isn’t an accident. It’s a package built to make a regulatory state look like it loves cars, on a day when the underlying zero-emission mandate didn’t move an inch.
The detail worth remembering isn’t the model years, the mileage cap, or even Jay Leno’s name on the bill. It’s that California just proved it can carve out a smog exemption so precisely measured, a decade of production, two verification paths on two different clocks, a fee capped to the dollar, that it never has to touch the thing it actually cares about protecting. Sacramento didn’t loosen its smog law. It built a ten-year door, priced admission at up to $40, and scheduled the lock to click shut in 2033.