A Feature Built for Convenience, Weaponized for Stalking
Modern vehicles are effectively rolling surveillance devices, equipped with GPS, always-on data connections, and companion apps that let a phone track a car’s location or control certain functions remotely. That’s genuinely useful for a parent checking on a teenage driver or someone locating a car in a crowded lot. It becomes something else entirely the moment the person holding that phone is an abuser using it to track down a partner attempting to escape.
California’s SB 1394, a 2024 law, was written directly to address that gap. It requires automakers to give drivers, particularly survivors of domestic violence, a clear and fast process to submit a restraining order or comparable documentation and have location tracking and remote vehicle access cut off or transferred away from an abuser. In effect, it mandates an off-switch for connected-car tracking, available specifically to the people who need it most urgently. The underlying goal here is genuinely difficult to argue against.
The Industry’s Response: A Statewide Ultimatum
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the lobbying group representing General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, and essentially every major automaker selling vehicles in the US, warned on June 23 that car companies may be forced to suspend sales of both new and used vehicles in California starting July 1, unless state lawmakers delay the compliance deadline attached to this tracking law. Rather than requesting a smaller technical accommodation, the industry is floating suspending sales entirely in a state that moves roughly two million vehicles a year, which is a remarkably bold negotiating posture by any measure.
To hear the Alliance describe it, automakers already comply with the core protections meant for abuse survivors, and their actual complaint is about timing. They argue they can’t realistically build the required process across every make, model, and connected-services platform before the compliance deadline arrives, and want it pushed back. Their proposed vehicle for that delay is SB 719, a bill that would extend the deadline out 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, a line clearly engineered to alarm state legislators.
Whether this amounts to a genuine compliance crisis or a high-stakes game of legislative chicken depends entirely on who’s asked. Critics point out that the underlying law has been on the books since 2024, which is a fairly generous runway to build what is, at its functional core, a button that says “stop sharing my location.”
This Isn’t the Industry’s First Data Fight
Anyone following the connected-car privacy beat will recognize this pattern. Automakers have spent the past few years getting caught with their hands in the data jar, drawing increasing regulatory attention as a result. Earlier this year, the FTC moved to restrict how GM handles driver data after finding that driving-behavior information had been collected and sold to insurance companies. Meanwhile, the same data the industry now says is too complicated to switch off on demand is valuable enough that Toyota has reportedly explored paying owners directly for access to it. The pattern is consistent: the vehicle knows where an owner is, who’s driving, and how they’re driving, and untangling that data flow becomes suddenly inconvenient the moment someone asks the industry to hand meaningful control back to the driver.
What Happens Next
For now, this remains a threat rather than a reality. The most likely outcome is that Sacramento grants some version of the delay through SB 719, since the stated alternative, a state where new and used cars can’t legally be sold, is a political non-starter for essentially everyone involved. Still, the fact that the industry is willing to threaten a statewide sales freeze as negotiating leverage says quite a bit about how much value automakers place on retaining control over vehicle data. It’s worth watching closely to see which side actually flinches first as the July 1 deadline approaches.
I too quit California.