If you are buying a car in California and you can wait until October, wait.
On October 1 the price in the ad becomes the price. Not the teaser number that turns into something else once you are sitting at the desk with a pen.
What the law does
SB 766, the California Combating Auto Retail Scams Act, became law on October 6, 2025 and becomes operative October 1, 2026. Three things change. The total price has to be clear and conspicuous in any ad that names a specific vehicle, in written pricing or financing communications, and in the dealer’s first response about a car. When an add-on comes up in writing, the dealer has to tell you the add-on is not required and that you can buy the car without it. And charging for an add-on that gives you no benefit becomes a violation.
The bill names examples of the third one. Tires sold to you as nitrogen filled that are not at least 95% nitrogen. Oil changes on an electric car.
Somebody had to write that down in a statute.
The part nobody put in the press release
Washington wrote this rule first. The FTC finalized its CARS Rule in January 2024, covering the same ground for the whole country. The National Automobile Dealers Association and the Texas Automobile Dealers Association sued. On January 27, 2025 the Fifth Circuit threw the rule out because the FTC had not issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking that its own procedures required.
Not because the disclosures were wrong. Because of a missing step in the paperwork.
So the protection you were about to get nationally now depends on your zip code. California brought it back for its own buyers. If you live somewhere else, nothing changed for you on this.
What the add-ons actually cost you
The dealer rolls add-ons into the loan, which is where they stop feeling like money. Finance $2,000 of paint sealant, etched glass, and a service contract you did not ask for at 7% over 72 months and you pay about $2,455 by the end. That is the sealant plus roughly $455 in interest for the privilege of not noticing it. Run your own numbers on our loan calculator before you go in.
Do this
Ask for the out-the-door price in writing before you set foot in the showroom. That works today and it will still work in October.
If you are shopping in September, assume none of this protects you yet, and read the second page of the buyer’s order line by line. Anything you did not ask for, strike it and initial it.
After October 1, treat the advertised price on a specific car as the number. If a dealer walks it up with mandatory packages, that is now a disclosure violation, not a negotiating style.
And if you are financing, shop the loan separately from the car. Our auto loan guides and the best loan rankings exist because the dealer’s finance office is the most expensive room in the building. We ran the math on what stretching to 84 months really costs last week: about $3,500.
How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.