ELIOT'S ANALYSIS - With all the grace and market savvy of a communist five-year plan, Gavin Newsom and the California Energy Commission have decided that Californians cannot be trusted to buy their own tires. The state that already taxes your gasoline (the highest in the nation), regulates your fuel, dictates what kinds of cars manufacturers may sell, charges heavily to register those cars, and keeps looking for new ways to tax how far you drive has now moved deeper into your garage.
The latest regulatory overreach restricts replacement tires based on rolling resistance, all in the name of energy efficiency. According to the material surrounding the rule, it could eventually eliminate roughly 70 percent of tires currently sold in California from the replacement market. Fewer choices, more compliance costs, and for sure higher prices for a worse product: the usual California trifecta. Regulate the market, shrink the market, then tell consumers government is doing them a favor.
Just look at this non-elected Commissioner (Nancy Skinner); she knows she's telling a whopper about regulating tires bigger than the whole Burger King franchise. She is literally laughing at us, knowing the pain she will be causing.
This is what California government increasingly looks like: central planning by people who hate you. This is government micromanagement of private economic choices. Sacramento now dresses it up in language about efficiency, climate policy, consumer savings, and public benefit. Which is little more than propaganda words to sell us additional unnecessary regulation. But beneath the euphemisms lies the same idea that animated communist five-year plans: bureaucrats know better.
Instead of millions of individuals making their own decisions, the Energy Commission decides which tires are acceptable. The Air Resources Board decides which engines (hint: not internal combustion engines) and emissions are acceptable. Other agencies decide what appliances (not natural gas appliances), fuels, water heaters, and furnaces are acceptable. Every year the circle of personal choice gets smaller while the circle of administrative power gets larger, and your bill for all this overregulation becomes even more expensive.
The tire mandate is particularly revealing because tires are not a frivolous luxury. They are a basic necessity for safety and transportation. People need them to get to work, take children to school, go to the doctor, buy groceries, and simply function in a state built around the automobile.
“California leaders deliberately make driving financially painful with the goal of forcing you onto public transportation. They brag about it in legislation.” -Spenser Pratt on X
Consumers typically choose tires based on price, tread life, ride comfort, noise, handling, weather performance, durability, and fuel economy. Different drivers have different needs. Someone commuting 30,000 miles a year may care deeply about rolling resistance. Someone keeping an older Honda on a tight budget may care most about price. A mountain driver may prioritize traction. A truck owner may prioritize durability. The free market permits all of those choices. Now, Sacramento will make the choice for you.
The official justification is almost insulting. Regulators argue that more efficient tires will save drivers money on gasoline or electricity over time. These are the same commissioners who would rather put a sharp stick in their eye than lower gas prices a penny.
The California Energy Commission has cited projected savings as a reason for the regulation. But if these tires are so economically superior, why is a mandate necessary? Tire manufacturers already know consumers care about fuel economy. EV owners care about range. If one tire saves meaningful money without sacrificing price, performance, tread life, or other qualities, manufacturers have every incentive to advertise it, and consumers have every incentive to buy it. That is how a functioning market communicates value. The government does not need to ban competing products for a superior product to succeed.
The irony deepens when California officials cite the high price of gasoline as a reason to impose the tire rule. These are the same political institutions that have layered taxes, fees, special fuel requirements and regulatory costs onto every gallon Californians buy. They have created such onerous rules that refineries have closed, and major oil companies with long histories in California have moved out of state. Then, after helping make gasoline extraordinarily expensive, they point at those prices and declare that drivers need state-approved tires to protect them from the expense. It is a regulatory feedback loop in which every government-created burden becomes the excuse for the next government intervention.
And the costs do not disappear just because regulators put the word “efficiency” in the rule. Manufacturers and sellers must comply with California-specific standards. Product lines can be narrowed. Testing, certification, distribution, and inventory become more complicated. Competition falls when products are removed from the market. Consumers who once chose among many price points may find that their cheaper option is no longer legal for sale. So they buy a bald, damaged, or unsafe tire and need to get back on the road. Another $25, $50 or $100 today is real money, especially for a family already paying California prices for gasoline, electricity, insurance, housing and taxes.
This is not theoretical. California has already created a separate, more expensive market for catalytic converters. A federally legal replacement that can be installed in much of the country may be illegal to install in California unless CARB has specifically approved it for that vehicle. The result is fewer replacement choices and, generally, higher costs for California motorists. Now Sacramento is applying the same regulatory over-burden to tires.
There is also a legitimate question about whether maximizing rolling efficiency should override other characteristics consumers may value more, such as grip, ride quality, durability, and other performance characteristics. Those trade-offs are precisely what manufacturers, engineers, dealers, and consumers can evaluate. Sacramento should establish legitimate safety standards and punish fraud. It should not behave as the purchasing department for 39 million people.
This is where the tire issue becomes much bigger than tires. California’s governing class has developed an increasingly obvious hostility toward the automobile and, more broadly, toward individual economic choice.
The state does not merely want cleaner cars. It wants more control over mobility. Policymakers have explored mileage-based road charges as gasoline-tax revenue declines. They have pushed aggressive vehicle mandates and regulate fuels, emissions, smog compliance and registration. Now they are reaching into replacement tires. Each rule can be described as small. Taken together, they form a system in which owning and operating a car becomes a privilege continuously conditioned on satisfying Sacramento’s latest theory of how you should live.
That is central planning. It may not be Soviet-style state ownership of every factory, but the governing instinct is unmistakably similar: private property remains nominally yours while the state increasingly dictates how it may be used and how much you will pay to use your own property. You may own the car, but government decides what powers it, what comes out of its tailpipe, how much you pay to fuel it, how it is inspected, and what replacement products are acceptable. The state does not have to confiscate your automobile if it can regulate every decision you make about how to use it. Control arrives not through a single dramatic act but through hundreds of technical rules that collectively make ordinary life less free and more expensive.
The defenders of this system insist that each regulation is reasonable, scientific, and too small to get upset about. That is how overregulation advances. One rule for tires. Another for appliances. Another for stoves. Another for water heaters. Another for cars. Another for fuel. Another for mileage. Another fee, permit, commission, and mandatory standard. Eventually the citizen is surrounded by regulations written by people he never elected, administered by agencies he barely knows exist, and enforced through costs he cannot avoid. Then politicians wonder why businesses leave, why middle-class families leave, and why so many Californians feel the state has become hostile to ordinary life.
The free market is not perfect, but it has one great virtue Sacramento increasingly distrusts: people get to choose. They can buy the expensive tire or the cheap tire. They can value fuel economy or handling. They can decide whether an efficiency improvement is worth the extra cost. Manufacturers that make good products gain customers; manufacturers that make bad products lose them. Millions of independent decisions create more knowledge than a commission can ever possess. Central planners have always believed they can improve on that process. History suggests otherwise.
This tire mandate sounds trivial until you understand what it represents. It is another transfer of power from the citizen to the state, another reduction in consumer choice, another intrusion into the free market, and another reminder that California government no longer seems to know where its authority should end. California-compliant is rarely cheaper and never simpler.
What we really need is better roads. Better roads will help our tires last longer. But most importantly, we need better politicians. Above all, restore freedom of choice.
I am tired of being told by people who never seem to pay the cost of their own rules what I must buy, what I cannot buy, what I must drive, what I must pay. I do not want every ordinary decision turned into a regulatory question. I do not want to live under California’s version of a five-year plan. I want to live in America.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
