If California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has any aspirations for higher office, he’d better not screw this up. On his desk sits a bill that would allow smog-era cars from the late 1970s and early 1980s to bypass SMOG tests that are often extremely difficult to pass, thus bringing more vintage automotive glory to California’s roads. Unfortunately, after Leno’s Law failed last year, and after decades of enforcing a silly 1975 SMOG exemption instead of a rolling exemption for cars of a certain age, far too many people have had to sell their beloved 1970s/80s automobiles. Including me.
I always thought I’d keep my 1985 Jeep J10 forever. It was the perfect spec of the Jeep pickup I always wanted: It had the inline-six, the four-speed manual, the tall 2.73 gears for road tripping, the eight-foot bed, a stamped tailgate, a gun rack, bench seat, a regular cab, four-wheel drive, manual locking hubs — it was truly a truck’s truck. And with only 85,000 miles on it and a manual transmission that I myself had rebuilt, the thing was the most reliable machine I’d ever owned. The only problem was, I moved to California, and California’s SMOG rules required that I have all the components in place: The EGR, the original carburetor, the vacuum hoses, the secondary air injection pump, a fresh catalytic converter, and on and on.
Over the past few years, there has been hope in the air, and so I held onto my J10, just waiting to see if long-awaited relief for these SMOG-era cars was finally coming. A bill, championed by Jay Leno, seemed like the answer to my problems, as I wrote in my article California’s Smog Rules Are Pushing Me To Sell My Beloved 1985 Jeep J10, And The Improbable ‘Leno’s Law’ Is My Only Hope.
But then this happened: Leno’s Law Is Officially Dead, Which Means Classic Car Owners In California Will Continue to Suffer. I later wrote about how, because there are so many great pre-1976 cars, and because fuel injection became prominent in the mid 1980s, there are still so many amazing options for enthusiasts in California (this was met with readers rightly pointing out that the cars in that 10-year span represent so few vehicles, why even bother making it hard for their owners?). I also went out and bought my truck’s replacement, the Jeep J10’s successor, the Jeep Comanche, configured in exactly the same way — long bed, regular cab, bench seat, stickshift, 4×4, inline-six:
But even if I had a replacement, and even if I still think there are plenty of awesome cars on the road in California, I’m still bummed I had to sell my J10, and I agree with readers that making it hard to SMOG cars in this small span of model-years — cars that aren’t really daily drivers anyway — seems pointless. Which is why I hope Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t screw this up.
The New York Times breaks the bill down, writing in its piece Jay Leno’s Classic Car Bill Passes in California Legislature:
The bill would exempt some cars made before the model year 1981 from the standard smog checks that determine whether the pollutants they emit are within safe limits. Car collectors say that the current rules in California — which generally require gasoline-powered vehicles from model year 1976 onward to undergo a smog check every two years — are overly restrictive.
“Most of these cars that we’re talking about, they get driven to a car show on a Saturday,” Mr. Leno said. “The car’s parked all day, and then it’s driven home at night.”
The exemption, which applies only to qualifying collector cars, would take effect in January 2028 and be phased in over five years, eventually exempting collector cars made before model year 1986 from smog checks. To qualify, owners must either have collector-car insurance or prove that the vehicle is driven fewer than 1,000 miles per year.
You can read the whole story on The New York Times. It’s a bit slanted, focusing on the fact that these old cars could produce 20x the emissions of a new car, and even though it’s not going to account for a lot of vehicle-miles, it’s still a step in the wrong direction, public-health-wise. I get where they’re coming from, but we as a society have to decide what we think is acceptable from an emissions standpoint, because absolute zero-emissions isn’t going to happen. We have to make compromises, and I, a car enthusiast who daily-drives an electric car, think getting more of these cool cars on the road is worth the small tradeoff, especially if these cars and their repairs can be taxed in a way that offsets some of those emissions.
Governor Gavin Newsom will decide by September 30th whether to sign the bipartisan bill. I hope he does, even though I no longer have a horse in this race, for my beloved Jeep J10 fell victim to the draconian fixed-1975 SMOG exemption. I’m sure many tens of thousands of other 1970s and 1980s cars were either scrapped or sold out of state due to their owners’ inability to get them through SMOG; it’s time for California’s eradication of one of the coolest automotive eras to come to an end.
Top graphic image: David Tracy