- Automakers say a California law could force a sales halt starting July 1.
- The industry already complies with key protections for abuse survivors.
- The real dispute centers on disabling vehicle tracking in existing cars.
If you only read the headlines, you’d think California dealerships might be staring down an empty showroom crisis on July 1. That’s when automakers say a new state law could force them to halt vehicle sales. In reality, the odds of that happening are microscopic. The more interesting question is why so many connected cars were built without simple ways for drivers to stop sharing their location in the first place.
The warning comes from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group that represents nearly every major automaker selling vehicles in America. The group is urging lawmakers and Governor Gavin Newsom to quickly pass SB 719, a bill that would delay portions of California’s domestic violence survivor protection law known as SB 1394.
The Industry Already Meets the Core Protections
It’s important to note what isn’t in dispute. Automakers have already implemented the law’s requirement that survivors can submit documentation and have another person’s access to connected vehicle services terminated within two business days. That process is already in place. Instead, the fight is over a requirement for vehicles to offer a way to disable location access from inside the car itself.
Read: Nearly Every Automaker Is Selling Your Data
“Changes involving connected services must be engineered and validated to ensure they do not interfere with GPS, theft prevention systems, emergency services, advanced driver assistance systems, or other vehicle functions,” the group writes. It wants the deadline pushed to July 1, 2027 for older vehicles and to 2031 for “all vehicles.” Those, it says, are the dates that would give automakers the time they need to implement the change.
On one hand, the industry has a point. Retrofitting millions of existing vehicles isn’t as simple as pushing a software update. Different vehicles use different hardware, software, telematics systems, and connected-service architectures. Adding new functionality without disrupting navigation, theft recovery, or the systems already named above is a real engineering challenge.
The Real Fight Is Over Tracking Existing Cars
The bill doesn’t just push for a later deadline, though. It also removes a protection that would indicate to someone inside the vehicle when someone outside of it accessed its connected services or vehicle location information. On top of that, automakers aren’t exactly innocent bystanders here.
For years, these same automakers invested heavily in systems that collected location and vehicle data because those systems created value for the companies. Privacy controls often lagged. Now the industry is arguing that adding those controls retroactively is difficult because the systems were never designed with them in mind.
And as for the threatened California sales freeze? Expect lawmakers, regulators, automakers, or some combination of all three to find a solution long before the state’s dealerships start collecting dust.
