Former late-night host Jay Leno appeared at the California Capitol to push a bipartisan bill that would exempt pre-1981 classic cars from the state's emissions tests, a measure environmental regulators warn could open a loophole.
Leno stood alongside state Sen. Shannon Grove on Wednesday to rally support for Senate Bill 1392, dubbed "Leno's Law." The legislation would free qualifying classic and collector cars built before the 1981 model year from California's smog-check requirement and gradually expand the cutoff through the 1986 model year by 2032. The bill now awaits a key vote in the California Assembly, and lawmakers face an end-of-August deadline to send it to the governor.
The pitch is straightforward: owners of decades-old cars say they cannot find testing stations equipped to inspect their vehicles. That leaves them with a legal car they cannot legally register, through no fault of their own.
Leno, who houses roughly 181 cars and 160 motorcycles at his Big Dog Garage in Burbank, California, a collection valued between $50 million and $100 million, framed the issue as one of common sense, not wealth. As the New York Post reported, Leno told lawmakers that classic car owners across the state approach him for help navigating the rules.
"The idea of, I mean, you have an old car, it's been legal your whole life, and now it's illegal because you can't find a station to do the emissions test. So what do you do? It's your car."
He didn't stop there.
"So you keep driving it, and you keep hoping a policeman doesn't see you. And then now you're just making criminals out of people that want to do the right thing."
That last line captures the absurdity California's regulatory apparatus has produced. Law-abiding hobbyists who want to comply cannot comply, because the infrastructure to test their vehicles no longer exists. The state's response so far has been to leave them in limbo, or, effectively, to treat them like scofflaws.
Sen. Grove described SB 1392 as an equity measure, not the kind of equity Sacramento usually invokes, but the practical kind. Leno can afford a locked, climate-controlled garage. Most classic car owners cannot.
"There are people out there who can have a locked garage and a locked-key facility so that they can be inside these museum-type facilities, like Mr. Leno has. But there's also a lot of people who can't afford that. And our goal is to make equity happen throughout the state."
Grove recalled how the partnership began. She won a visit to Leno's garage at a charity auction. Near the end of the tour, Leno drove in and asked if she was the visiting senator.
"When the tour was almost over, here [Leno] comes in the garage driving in, and he said, 'Is this her?' And they said, 'Yes.' And he says, 'We need to fix this smog bill law.'"
That exchange produced the bill now sitting in the Assembly.
Not everyone in Sacramento is on board. The Bay Area Air District testified against the measure, warning lawmakers that SB 1392 would create "a massive loophole that non-hobbyists will exploit to avoid smog checks for their older, higher emitting vehicles."
Under current California law, all cars built after 1986 must pass a smog test every two years to renew their registration. Most gas-powered vehicles face a biennial smog check. The bill would carve out an exception that grows wider over time, reaching the 1986 model year by 2032.
A similar bill failed last year after environmental groups and clean-air advocates pushed back. The specific groups behind that opposition, beyond the Bay Area Air District, remain unclear, as does whether the governor has signaled any position on the current version.
Lawmakers have until the end of August to move SB 1392 to the governor's desk. The bill has bipartisan support, but last year's failure shows that Sacramento's environmental lobby carries enough weight to stall even popular, narrowly tailored measures.
The question facing the Assembly is simple. Forty-plus-year-old collector cars are a rounding error in California's emissions picture. The state has spent years pushing electric vehicles, tightening tailpipe standards, and phasing out gas-powered cars entirely. Against that backdrop, punishing hobbyists who own a handful of vintage machines, and who literally cannot find a shop to test them, looks less like environmental stewardship and more like bureaucratic inertia.
California has a habit of writing rules so rigid they punish the people who try hardest to follow them. If lawmakers cannot carve out room for a 1972 Chevelle, the regulatory machine is no longer protecting clean air, it is just protecting itself.
