Is it law yet? No.
As of 13 September 2026, docket 26-TIRE-01 shows no Final Statement of Reasons and no submission to the Office of Administrative Law. Nothing has been docketed since 26 August. The Commission adopted the regulations on 17 August. Until OAL review is complete and the rule is filed with the Secretary of State, it is not in effect and nothing in it is enforceable.
We check this two ways. OAL publishes its own list of rulemakings under review, states that it is updated daily, and it carried file numbers through 2026-0910-02 when we read it on 13 September — the tire program is not on it, and no Energy Commission package of any kind is on it. Twenty-seven days after the vote, the submission has not happened.
The Commission's own website now says the same thing. On 3 September it posted a clean copy of the adopted text under a cover note that reads: “Only the regulations, as finalized by the Office of Administrative Law and filed with the Secretary of State, represent the official requirements.” That is the agency describing its own rule as not yet final.
The OAL notice file number for this rulemaking is Z # 2026-0324-03. There is no litigation on the docket. Docket log and OAL under-review list, checked 13 Sep 2026. The wider litigation sweep — courts and the bill record — was last run 19 Aug 2026 and is dated separately on the main page.
The dates moved
This is the single most important thing that changed, and it is the reason some of the numbers in circulation do not match the rule as adopted. In its 17 July 2026 notice, the Commission described amendments
“including the delay of the proposed Phase 1 and Phase 2 implementation dates by one year and two years, respectively”
Notice of Additional Public Comment Period and Summary of Changes, TN 271526, 17 July 2026 · restated in Resolution 26-0817-09, TN 272046.
So the widely-quoted analyses of “how many tires would fail” were written against an earlier, tighter schedule. Phase 2 in particular was being discussed at a 2031 date before the two-year delay carried it to 2033. If you have seen a dramatic figure about this program, check which schedule it was measured against — ours traces to a comment written when Phase 2 was still 2031. How we traced that figure →
The Commission's own position is that the delay changes nothing analytically: it “does not have any significant impact on, or result in a change to, the conclusions reached in the Staff Report, Draft EIR, SRIA”.
The rulemaking, step by step
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Sep 2026 | Clean copy of the adopted text posted on the Commission's website, headed “Adopted RTEP Express Terms” and carrying a cover note that only the OAL-finalized text is official. It reads 9.0 and 7.1 N/kN for a standard replacement tire — the same figures as the July text, and not the 9.1 and 7.2 in circulation. Not on the docket; the proceeding page links it with the label “As Adopted 8/13/2026”, a date four days before the adoption vote that we cannot explain and do not try to. | CEC website · our archived copy (PDF) |
| 26 Aug 2026 | A state senator asks the Commission to revisit the decision. Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh's letter, dated 19 August, says she writes “to express my disagreement with the California Energy Commission’s recent decision to adopt the Replacement Tire Efficiency Program” and asks the Commission “to revisit this decision with affordability, consumer choice, and equity at the center of its analysis.” A letter on the docket, not a legal action. | TN 272188 |
| 26 Aug 2026 | Staff memo asking the Docket Unit to close the environmental-review docket, 24-TIRE-01, now that the EIR is certified; its files stay viewable. Docket 26-TIRE-01 stays open. | TN 272186 (24-TIRE-01) |
| 24–25 Aug 2026 | Seven more public comments after adoption. By their docket titles: a request for a specialty-performance tire review and segment-specific cost-effectiveness analysis, lifecycle environmental impacts, and general opposition. | TN 272148–272165 |
| 21 Aug 2026 | CEQA Notice of Determination filed with the Office of Planning and Research: the Commission approved the project on 17 August, an EIR was prepared, and the form records that the project will not have a significant effect on the environment. State Clearinghouse no. 2024090611. | TN 272129 (24-TIRE-01) |
| 20–21 Aug 2026 | Twelve public comments filed after adoption. By their docket titles: freedom of choice, safety, consumer cost, the competition-tire definition, off-road tires, and tire sizes. | TN 272062–272134 |
| 19 Aug 2026 | Resolution 26-0817-09 docketed — certifying the Final EIR and adopting the regulations. | TN 272046 |
| 17 Aug 2026 | CEC Business Meeting. Final EIR certified, regulations adopted. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 7 Aug 2026 | Notice of Adoption Hearing posted; Final EIR published. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 3 Aug 2026 | Additional comment period closed. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 30 Jul 2026 | CalRecycle filed a letter of support, acknowledging the consultation the statute requires. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 17 Jul 2026 | Notice of Additional Public Comment Period + amended express terms. Phase 1 delayed one year, Phase 2 delayed two. Separately, an addendum clarified the Smithers wet-grip method for light-truck tires. | TN 271526 |
| 16 Jun 2026 | Formal comment period closed — 52 days. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 10 Jun 2026 | Public hearing on the proposed regulations. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 24 Apr 2026 | Notice of Proposed Action, Initial Statement of Reasons, proposed express terms, and Staff Report CEC-600-2026-012. Draft EIR sent to the Office of Planning and Research. | TN 269617 |
| 30 Sep 2024 | CEQA scoping meeting. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 11 Sep 2024 | Notice of Preparation of a Draft EIR. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 14 Feb 2023 | Pre-rulemaking workshop, with Smithers and the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association presenting. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 2 Feb 2023 | Draft staff report proposing the program. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
| 2003 | AB 844 (Nation, Ch. 645) directs the Commission to implement a Replacement Tire Efficiency Program. Codified at Public Resources Code §§25770–25773. The rule adopted in 2026 carries out a statute passed twenty-three years earlier. | Resolution 26-0817-09 |
What the Commission changed in July, section by section
When the Commission reopened comment on 17 July it published a section-by-section Summary of Changes — its own plain-English account of every amendment. That document is the clearest description of this rule that exists, and it is buried in a 70-page PDF. We are working through it in full; the changes verified so far are below, each quoted or closely paraphrased from the Commission's own summary.
| Section | What changed |
|---|---|
| §3303(b)(2) | The wet-grip test method for light-truck and commercial tires changed from ISO 23671 to ISO 15222. The Commission's reason: ISO 23671’s own scope section “states that the scope applies to passenger car tires”, while ISO 15222 uses a reference tire “sized and rated directly in the light truck tire range”. A passenger-car method was being applied to light trucks; that was fixed. |
| §3303(b), (b)(1) | New paragraphs separating wet-grip test methods for passenger car tires from those for light-truck tires. |
| §3303(f), (f)(1), (f)(2) | Treadwear testing spelled out for light-truck and commercial tires, including which inflation pressure and test-load multiplier apply when the federal rule does not specify one. |
| §3304(a)(1)(A) | Moving a tire from the approved database to the archived database became mandatory rather than permissive for staff — and a 30-day notice to the listed contact was added, where the original text said no notice would be given. The notice must also say that a new statement can be filed under §3305. |
| §3304(a)(2)(A) | Struck the language allowing archived information to be deleted after two years without notice. |
| §3303, §3303(e), (g) | Federal citation dates updated; ISO 15222:2025, ASTM F2493-2020 and ASTM F2872-25 added as documents incorporated by reference. |
One thing we cannot yet reconcile. Resolution 26-0817-09 describes the Smithers addendum as using “ISO 15222 (2021)”. The Summary of Changes for §3303(b)(2) refers to ISO 15222:2025, and lists ISO 15222:2025 among the documents incorporated by reference. We report both, attributed, and we are not guessing which is controlling. Separately, see the 9.1 figure that appears throughout the coverage but in none of the filings — a correction to what this site previously said about it is noted there.
On the Commission's website, not on the docket
Two things the Commission has published sit on its website rather than in the docket, so they carry no transaction number — the first posted on September 3, the second undated. We record them here with the date we read them.
- The clean adopted text (3 Sep 2026, above). Forty pages, no strikethrough, under a cover note that it “does not constitute legal advice” and that only the OAL-finalized version is official. We have archived a copy.
- “Correcting the Record on California’s New Tire Efficiency Standards” — an undated communications page, linked from the proceeding page, whose first line is “Myth: California is banning 70% of tires.” It also states that “Retailers will continue to be able to sell their inventory without issue.” It is an agency communications page, not a regulatory document, and we cite it as that. CEC, read 13 Sep 2026.
Corrections to this site
We publish our own errors here, dated, for the same reason we publish everything else with a source attached: a reference that quietly edits itself is not one you can check.
26 August 2026 — the 9.1 N/kN attribution. This site said the Commission's own press release stated 9.1 and 7.2 N/kN, and framed the gap against the adopted text's 9.0 and 7.1 as the Commission contradicting itself. That attribution was wrong. The CEC news release of 17 August contains no rolling-resistance figure at all; we confirmed it on the live page and on archived captures from 18, 19 and 24 August. The underlying finding stands and is in fact cleaner — 9.0 and 7.1 are what the filings say, and 9.1 appears in the coverage but in no filing we can find — but we had named a source for a number that source never printed. It is corrected on the main page.
26 August 2026 — the CTDA filing. This site said we searched the docket and could not find a California Tire Dealers Association filing. CTDA's executive director signed the opposition coalition letter at TN 269714, docketed 29 April 2026. What we have still not found is a filing in which CTDA asks for the one-year delay that Modern Tire Dealer credits to it; that narrower point is what the page now says.
13 September 2026 — our own MCP endpoint was still attributing 9.1 to the press
release. The 26 August correction above was made on this page, the main page and
llms.txt. The machine-readable copy of the registry that answers agents at
/mcp was not swept, and until today it still said the Commission's press release states
9.1 and 7.2 N/kN. It now says what the record says: the figures are in the coverage, in no filing,
and not in the press release; and the clean adopted text posted 3 September reads 9.0 and 7.1 as
well.
29 August 2026 — three quotes in our own fact registry were paraphrases. A monthly job now re-fetches the sources behind that registry and checks that each recorded quote is still on the page it came from. Its first run found three where it was not, and all three were our error rather than the page changing: we had written down the sense of a sentence and filed it as though it were the sentence. Two never reached a page — the scope of the program and the reporting duty are stated on this site from the express terms, and both now cite §3302(a)(46) and §3305(a) directly. The third leaked one word: we had called the leaf rating a “consumer-facing” scale, which sits badly beside our own finding that nothing in the adopted text requires it to be displayed anywhere. That word is gone. And the row asserting that manufacturers must comply is withdrawn rather than softened — the source it cited says they would be required to report, describing a proposal, and this regulation is still not law.
Read the source yourself
The primary documents are on the CEC docket or its website, and we keep archived copies so these citations cannot rot:
- Adopted RTEP Express Terms — the clean adopted text, posted 3 September 2026, forty pages, with the Commission's cover note. CEC copy · our archived copy (PDF)
- Resolution 26-0817-09 — certifies the Final EIR and adopts the program. CEC copy · our archived copy (PDF)
- Notice of Additional Public Comment Period and Summary of Changes — contains the section-by-section summary and the amended express terms in strikethrough/underline. CEC copy · our archived copy (PDF)
- The live docket — 26-TIRE-01 filing log
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Every claim on this page is sourced to a document on the public docket, with the date we checked it. Where the record contradicts itself, we publish both readings and say so.