Governor Gavin Newsom signed three car bills on September 16. Two of them got a stage, a camera crew, and Jay Leno. The third got one sentence near the bottom of the press release.
The third one is the one that matters.
Senate Bill 1069, authored by Sen. Grayson and coauthored by Sen. Dave Cortese, is now Chapter 244 of the 2026 statutes. It does something California has never done to its aftermarket parts program. Beginning January 1, 2027, if the Air Resources Board fails to act on a qualifying application within 30 business days, the manufacturer may start selling the part anyway. Silence becomes consent.
This is not a story about faster paperwork for parts companies. It is a story about who pays for regulatory delay, and California just changed the answer.
What the law actually does
To see the change, you have to understand the thing being changed. Under Vehicle Code Section 27156, it is unlawful in California to install, sell, offer for sale, or even advertise a device that alters or modifies a required emissions control system. The escape hatch is an Executive Order, or EO, issued by the California Air Resources Board after an engineering review concludes the part does not increase emissions. CARB is blunt about what that number is for: an EO number is assigned to every exempted part and verified by Smog Check stations, BAR referee stations, or CARB itself.
No EO, no legal sale. That has been the arrangement for decades.
SB 1069 adds Section 43019.4 to the Health and Safety Code and creates a second, temporary status: conditional approval. A qualifying manufacturer files a complete application, meaning the required documentation, the fees, a validated test report from a CARB-recognized emissions laboratory, and a signed certification that the part meets the Section 27156 criteria. Then it asks permission to sell while the review continues. CARB has 30 business days to determine whether the application is complete and the applicant qualifies. If the answer is yes, the conditional approval takes effect that day. If CARB says nothing at all, the request is deemed conditionally approved, and it goes live once the manufacturer notifies the board in writing that it intends to start selling.
From there, the statute says the plainest thing in the bill. A conditional approval is to be “treated as the equivalent to an executive order.” It runs for two years, or until the real EO arrives, whichever comes first.
California already ordered this eight years ago
Here is the part most coverage will skip. In 2018, the Legislature added Health and Safety Code Section 43019.3, which directed CARB to run a public process to review its exemption procedures with the stated goal of streamlining them, and to consider outside resources and structural changes so that parts reach the market sooner.
Read that again. The instruction to speed this up is eight years old.
What the 2018 language did not include was a deadline, a consequence, or a default outcome. The 2026 language includes all three. That is the entire difference between the two statutes, and it is the most portable lesson in this story for anyone who follows regulation in any industry: a mandate without a deadline is not a rule, it is a waiting room.
Who actually gets the fast lane
This is where the bill turns out to be less populist than it sounds. A manufacturer cannot request conditional approval unless CARB has already issued it at least ten executive orders, and at least one of those must fall in the same application category as the part now under review.
Ten. Not one, not three.
That is a trusted-shipper model, the kind customs agencies and food regulators have used for years, applied to camshafts and cold-air intakes. Regulators like it because verified history is cheap to check and expensive to fake. It also has a predictable side effect. It converts a company’s compliance record into an asset with real balance-sheet value, and it does nothing whatsoever for the two-person shop with a genuinely better cylinder head and no EOs to its name.
The newcomer waits in exactly the line it has always waited in. The established manufacturer with a filing cabinet full of executive orders sells on day 31. If you have ever wondered why incumbents so reliably support regulatory streamlining, this is the shape it usually takes.
The fast lane has a toll booth at the end of it
Conditional approval is not forgiveness, and the drafting makes sure of it. If the approval is withdrawn, revoked, or simply expires, CARB’s executive officer may require a recall, a corrective action plan, or a stop-sale order covering parts already sold, advertised, or installed. The manufacturer pays for all of it. A company that fails to carry out a required recall or corrective action plan is exposed to civil penalties under Health and Safety Code Section 43008.6, which lets the board collect up to $1,500 for each violation of Section 27156.
Now run that arithmetic on an intake that moved 4,000 units over 18 months before the application was denied.
There is a second string attached. Anyone selling under a conditional approval must keep detailed records of every part sold and hand them to CARB within 30 days of a request. Failing to do so is itself grounds for revocation. So the price of selling early is a sales ledger the regulator can call for at will, plus a contingent recall liability sitting on the books for as long as two years.
Plenty of companies will take that trade without blinking. Cash flow beats caution when the tooling is already paid for and the inventory is already in the warehouse. Others, particularly mid-size manufacturers without the reserves to fund a recall, will look at the exposure and keep waiting for the real thing. That self-selection is almost certainly the point.
The number that tells you the most
Tucked into the statute is a surge valve. If CARB receives more than 50 conditional-approval requests in any 30-business-day window, it may extend the clock by 15 business days for each additional increment of 50, with written notice, and only once per application.
Fifty. In roughly six weeks.
Legislative drafters do not pull thresholds like that out of the air. That figure is a negotiated estimate of what the program can absorb before the deadline stops being realistic, and it is the closest thing in the bill to an admission of how thin the staffing is on the other side of the counter. It also tells you the Legislature expects the fast lane to get used.
The question the statute does not answer
An executive order is, practically speaking, a number. It goes on a label, into CARB’s public parts lookup, and onto the screen of whoever is inspecting your car. A conditional approval, by definition, does not have that number yet.
So what does the technician type in?
The law gives CARB until July 1, 2028 to revise its exemption procedures, forms, and guidance as necessary. The conditional approval mechanism goes live January 1, 2027. That leaves an 18-month stretch in which parts can be sold legally under a status the verification chain was never built to recognize. CARB can close that gap early, and nothing in the statute stops it from doing so. But the statute did not require it to, and it is shops and car owners, not manufacturers, who are standing at the counter when the answer is unclear. Californians who have watched the state attach equipment citations to vehicle registration already know how expensive an unclear answer can get.
The shield stops at the state line
One more limit is worth knowing. The protection SB 1069 grants is written narrowly. A part sold under a conditional approval is not a violation of Section 27156 solely because a final determination has not been issued yet. Section 27156 is California law. It is not federal law.
The EPA separately enforces Clean Air Act prohibitions on manufacturing, selling, or installing parts that bypass or disable emissions controls. A California conditional approval is not a federal opinion about anything. And because so much of the industry treats a CARB number as the benchmark, to the point that automakers have pulled entire models out of CARB states rather than engineer around the standard, the arrival of a temporary tier with no number attached is going to require some careful language on packaging and in catalogs.
Three bills, one garage, one afternoon
The two bills that got photographed were about heritage: Jay Leno’s Law and the phased collector-car smog exemption it creates, plus a lowrider specialty plate. Both are real, both matter to the people they affect, and both are narrow by design. The Governor’s office devoted most of its announcement to them and gave SB 1069 a single line.
SB 1069 is the one with industrial consequences, and it cleared the Capitol without a single recorded no vote. Thirty-nine to nothing in the Senate. Seventy-eight to nothing in the Assembly. Thirty-nine to nothing again on concurrence, after a stop on the suspense file in both appropriations committees. Unanimity like that usually means one of two things. Either the bill is trivial, or everyone in the building already knew the process was broken and nobody wanted to be on record defending it.
It was not the trivial one.
What to remember
California has authority over what you bolt to your engine because it got a head start in 1966 and never gave it back. For most of the time since, that authority carried an unusual property: exercising it slowly cost the state nothing at all. The applicant absorbed the delay in inventory, payroll, and interest. The agency absorbed none of it.
SB 1069 does not loosen a single emissions standard. It does not make one part legal that was illegal before. All it does is attach a price to the clock, and then ask the manufacturer to post a bond, in the form of recall exposure, for the privilege of not waiting.
That is the whole story. Not looser rules. A different answer to the oldest question in regulation: when the government takes its time, who pays for it?