California CARS Act Is Here: Turning the New Rules Into a Defensible Dealership

The California CARS Act is no longer a future deadline. It is now in effect.

For months, California dealers have been preparing for new requirements involving total price, customer communications, payment disclosures, optional products, used-vehicle cancellations, and record retention.

But knowing what the law says is only the beginning.

Now the question is: Does your dealership’s sales process support it and can you prove it if challenged?

In this recorded session, you’ll learn:

• From advertising to the first written response: Where total-price requirements and customer communications create new compliance checkpoints
• From the desk to F&I: How payment presentations, financing assumptions, fees, and optional products should fit into a consistent process
• Three-day cancellation in practice: What dealers should consider across sales, F&I, accounting, inventory, trade-ins, and customer communication
• Record retention beyond the signed deal: What dealers may need to preserve to demonstrate what was advertised, presented, communicated, and ultimately agreed to
• Where processes break down: How inconsistent employee behavior, disconnected systems, and vendor workflows can create gaps even when the dealership has the right policy
• From policy to proof: How training, technology, workflow controls, and centralized documentation can help dealers make compliance more repeatable and defensible

Watch this practical discussion with Franjo M. Dolenac, Partner at LA-based law firm Scali Rasmussen, and Mark Richardson of Informativ about what California dealers should be doing now that the October 1 effective date has passed.

Franjo brings deep California dealer regulatory experience, while Mark brings more than 25 years of sales, SaaS and automotive technology experience. Together, they focus on what dealers need to do now to turn the CARS Act from legal language into a real-world, repeatable and defensible dealership process.