Californians for the past 54 years have relied on the state’s “lemon law” to fight back against car makers that sell them defective vehicles. Now, critics say Californians’ ability to recoup their money after buying a clunker could become more difficult, due to a hastily passed bill that lobbyists representing U.S. auto manufacturers and powerful attorneys groups drafted in secret.

Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t signed or vetoed Assembly Bill 1755. His spokesperson, Brandon Richards, on Friday said “the measure will be evaluated on its merits” before Newsom’s Sept. 30 bill-signing deadline.

But how the bill came to end up on his desk is the latest example of how influential lobbying groups write laws affecting millions of Californians behind closed doors — and how the measures are often passed with little time for public input or legislative debate.

“There wasn’t a single person who represents the people of California who knew about this and was a part of those conversations – for months,” Democratic San Ramon Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahantold her colleagues on the Assembly Judiciary Committee last month in the final days of the legislative session.

“They dropped this in our lap, and they expect us to buy an argument related to the urgency that feels, to be honest, not real. And we’re supposed to move this in a week’s time.”

The bill seeks to address a massive uptick in lemon law lawsuits clogging the state’s court system, but it started out earlier in the session as a measure dealing with child support.

Then on Aug. 20, with less than two weeks left in the session, the bill was stripped through the secretive “gut-and-amend” process. Its language was replaced with a 4,200-word bill that seeks to reform how lemon law disputes are resolved. The bill is so complicated its legislative analysis, which lawmakers should read to fully understand a measure’s consequences, was more than 10,000 words.

Former Los Angeles Democratic Assemblymember Mike Gatto said it’s unlikely that lawmakers actually read all that in those final chaotic days of the session with hundreds of other consequential bills still pending.

“Unfortunately, when the Legislature makes complex policy like that with great haste, it increases the reliance on non-elected personnel,” Gatto said. “And it increases the reliance on special interest groups who tell the legislators what the legislation contains. It’s very hard during that chaotic last week of session to, you know, be able to review things of great length like that.”

Downey Democratic Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, an attorney, told her Judiciary Committee colleagues she wasn’t comfortable voting for the bill because she wasn’t sure what it would do. “I want to make sure that consumers are protected as well,” she said. “Those are our constituents. And so that is what we really should be caring about. And I don’t know if consumers are really protected.”

The bill by two Democrats, Santa Ana Sen. Tom Umberg and San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra, nonetheless easily passed the Assembly committee, as well as the full Assembly and Senate.

Umberg’s office declined to answer CalMatters’ questions about the bill. Kalra’s office replied to an interview request with an emailed statement.

“AB 1755 went through the full legislative process with two robust committee hearings, consideration of amendments and all procedural steps,” Kalra said. “Despite concerns over process, the vast majority of members in both houses concluded this was a better policy for consumers and we could build upon the policy framework in subsequent years.”

Kalra acknowledged in his testimony that the measure was a product of negotiations between the groups behind the bill.

“AB 1755 represents a compromise between the consumer attorneys, (civil) defense attorneys, and some auto manufacturers, most notably General Motors,” Kalra told the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

Opposing the bill were Tesla and foreign auto companies including Volkswagen and Toyota as well as consumer groups such as the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Auto Safety, and Consumers For Auto Reliability and Safety, according to the Digital Democracy database.

Sen. Roger Niello, a Republican whose family owns car dealerships in the Sacramento area, said he was troubled that the bill split groups that are typically aligned on legislation. “My concern about this bill is the process by which it was developed,” Niello told his colleagues on the Senate floor. “And all you have to look at to question that is the support and opposition. This is very unusual. We don’t see this very often. … We have people, organizations from similar sources with opposite views on this. There’s something wrong with that.”

The number of lemon law cases in California courts climbed from nearly 15,000 filings in 2022 to more than 22,000 last year. In Los Angeles County, nearly 10% of all civil filings are lemon law cases, according to the bill’s analysis.