California’s war on cars knows no bounds, which is far out of step for the state that launched America’s car culture. While policymakers haven’t yet outlawed the classics, their failure to act responsibly has added to the burden of owning them. Famous classic collector Jay Leno aims to change this.

There are almost 36 million vehicles registered in California, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. While the number of classic cars is difficult to determine, Sen. Shannon Grove says there are 320,000 automobiles made from 1976 to 1991 in the state.

That’s an almost imperceptibly thin slice, less than 1%, of the total. Yet they are treated as if they are new when it comes to smog rules. Comedian and long-time late-night TV host Leno believes that’s the wrong way to treat vintage car enthusiasts. 

Standing in his garage before his 1982 Ford Mustang, once “used by the Highway Patrol to catch speeders,” Leno says in a recent video, “It’s kind of a California-only classic car.” 

It can be driven in every other state, he says, yet it can’t be legally driven in California, because “it no longer meets California emissions” standards. 

Current law exempts from smog testing only cars made before 1976. A proposal in the Legislature would change that. Senate Bill 712 would, starting Jan. 1, 2027, “fully exempt from the smog check requirements” any car that was “manufactured prior to the 1981 model year.” 

Beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, SB 712 “would expand this exemption by one model year, every year, for 5 years.” It “would be known, and may be cited as, Leno’s Law.” 

Or maybe “Leno’s Law 2.0” because similar legislation was stalled in committee last year. 

For most car owners, the smog test is a hassle, though it’s not the tightest hoop that California makes drivers jump through. Especially for those who own older cars, it can be an enormous headache. Vintage vehicles have to be checked with older equipment, and many smog testing stations “don’t have that anymore,” says Leno, “because there aren’t enough old cars to keep it going.” 

“So when you have an older car like this, you sometimes have to drive literally hundreds of miles just to find a gas station or smog station” that can do the job. “It’s a lot of work to try to do the right thing.”

As a retired entertainer, Leno is acutely aware that “we drove the movie industry out of Hollywood” and pleads with Sacramento to not “do the same thing with car culture.”

“Let’s keep car culture right here where the whole thing originated.” Yep, California, now getting rid of many of the things that, well, made California California.

It’s another symptom of California’s tragic decline.

The former Golden State’s kill-joy leftists who now control the levers of government and the courts are destroying all the home-spun joys of California one by one, and replacing them with their mirthless, woke culture and radical climate control policies.

So it really isn’t just about cars.

Sadly, lawmakers are as likely to reject the legislation again as they are to pass it. Even worse, they might find out that far-left Minnesota is considering a law that could “limit the use of ‘collector class’ vehicles to the weekends” unless they are traveling to a show or similar event. They might rush to pass their own version first, which would cause a traffic jam of classic cars fleeing to other states where their carburetors can breathe freely.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board