My name is James Reed. I've been a Honda master technician for twenty-five years and I'm the shop foreman where I work. My day is about an hour of driving each way and twelve hours in between. I came up flat rate, so I work through lunch and eat at my toolbox. As foreman I dispatch the work, help the other techs figure out what's in front of them, and keep track of where everybody is and what each of them is good at.
That is a specific kind of expertise, and it is worth being precise about what it covers. I diagnose cars for a living and I help the other techs in my shop diagnose theirs, so I spend the day in manufacturer specifications. I know what a load index and a speed rating are, what actually gets bolted to a truck versus what gets argued about online, and what changes on a vehicle when somebody puts a different diameter under it.
What I'm not: a lawyer, a tire engineer, or anybody at the California Energy Commission. I don't give legal advice here and I don't tell you what to do about your vehicle. What I do is read the filings in docket 26-TIRE-01 and report what they say, with the document attached, so you don't have to take my word for any of it.
Why I started this
I got into cars to build hot rods in the first place. There is a 1967 Barracuda in my garage, back-halfed, sitting on big tires. We used to drag race it until the local track closed. It has been broken for a couple of years now because we can't afford to get it fixed. There's a 1956 truck out there too. And there are lifted 4x4s on off-road tires, which are how I get out to deer hunt.
So when the headlines said California had banned most tires, that was not an abstract news story for me. My first reaction was not a measured one:
If California is banning my off-road vehicles and my drag racing vehicles, it genuinely is a concern to me. Maybe I need to move out of the state.
Then I went and read the thing. Most of what I had been told turned out to be wrong, in both directions. This site exists because there was no calm, sourced, checkable account of the rule anywhere, and I had already done the reading.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that actually keeps me at it. I raised my son in the garage and at car shows, and he grew up thinking that is the coolest thing there is. His dream car is one of the old Corvette Stingrays, the ones with the crazy angles and the fender humps. Whatever this rule turns out to mean, it lands on his hobby a lot longer than it lands on mine.
Having a stake is a reason to be careful, not a reason to shade it
I would rather tell you my interest than have you find it. Every person writing about this rule has one. Trade press has advertisers, the manufacturers have filings to defend, the advocacy groups have positions they took years ago, and I have a drag car. The difference I can actually offer is not neutrality, which nobody has. It is that every claim on this site is attached to the document it came from, so you can go check whether my interest bent the reporting.
There is one rule behind everything published here, and it is deliberately blunt: no claim ships without a source URL, a verbatim quote, and the date it was checked. If a sentence cannot clear that, it does not go up. That means the site is slower than the news cycle and shorter than it could be, and that is the trade I picked.
Three things follow from it that are worth knowing before you read anything else on the site:
- Every claim wears a visible badge. Regulation, Commission and Comment mean it was read out of the rulemaking record itself. Reported means it came from press or trade coverage, which this month was frequently wrong. Labeling it is not a hedge. It is so you can weigh it. How the badges work →
- Where the record contradicts itself, both readings get published. There are two of those so far and neither is resolved. I am not picking the one that suits the story.
- Where I don't know, the page says I don't know and names the docket to watch. That sentence is more useful to you than a confident guess, and it is the one thing almost nobody covering this rule is willing to write.
Two places the record went against me
This is the part that matters, so here are the receipts rather than a promise.
The custom and off-road page is not the page I wanted to write. The forums, which are full of people like me, had settled on a comfortable answer about off-road tires. Read line by line, the regulation does not give it. So the page says what the text says, in the text's own words, with the section numbers and a link to the filing, and the comfortable answer is not in there. Read it and check me →
The other one runs the same direction. The most quotable number in this whole story is the one that would help my side of the argument the most, and it is the one number this site refuses to state as a fact. I traced it back to the document it started in and published what was actually in there, including who wrote it and what they were arguing for. It was not what the headline suggested. How we traced it →
If the record ever does turn out to say the thing I was afraid of, that will get published exactly the same way, with the quote and the date. The site is worth something only for as long as its conclusions are not predictable from its author's garage.
How this site is written
Pages here are drafted with AI assistance and nothing publishes on its own. The drafting is not what makes a claim safe to print; the sourcing rule above is. Every regulatory quotation on this site was pulled from the filing itself rather than from an article about the filing. The two documents this site leans on hardest, the adopted express terms and the adopting resolution, are archived on this domain as well as linked at the Commission, so those citations cannot quietly rot if a URL moves; the rest are cited by transaction number, which is how you find them again if one does. Where a number is still unverified, it stays out.
How it makes money, which is not at all
Right now, nothing. There are no ads on this site, no affiliate links, nothing for sale, and I am not paid by any manufacturer, retailer, trade body or agency. Nobody outside this site reviews or approves a page before it publishes.
I am not going to pretend that is permanent. If this ever carries a sponsor or an affiliate link, it will be labeled on the page it appears on rather than buried here. And there is one line I won't cross: if the tire compliance lookup I'm working on ships, no sponsor will ever appear inside its results. A tool that tells you whether a tire clears a limit is worth exactly nothing the moment somebody can pay to change the answer.
What this site collects, which is nearly nothing
There are no accounts here, no sign-up, no newsletter and not a single form on any page, so there is no name, address or email address for this site to hold. Two things do measure traffic and you should hear it from me rather than find it in the page source. Every page carries Microsoft Clarity, which records anonymised session replays and heatmaps and is run by Microsoft on its own terms, not mine. And a first-party counter logs pageviews, how far down a page people read, and which of the source links they click through to at the Commission, keeping a visitor id in your browser so a return visit is not counted twice. That last number is the one I actually care about: it tells me whether readers are going and checking the filings instead of taking my word for it. There is no published privacy notice yet. There should be, and it is on the list.
Corrections
A correction is worth more to this site than a visit. If something here is wrong, the fastest way to prove it is the same way I would: open the source linked under the claim and read the section. Every figure, date and quotation on the site is tied to a document you can pull yourself, and where the Commission's own publications and its adopted text disagree, both are on the page with attribution.
CaliforniaTireLaw.com is independent. It is not affiliated with the California Energy Commission, any tire manufacturer, any retailer, or any trade association, and it does not provide legal advice. Its author has a personal interest in the outcome of this rulemaking, declared above. Every regulatory quotation on this site was read from the filings in docket 26-TIRE-01 rather than from press coverage of them.