The Lemon Law Attorney's craziest cases

okay why didn't you call me three engines ago [Music] so i'm an attorney i specialize in lemon law i've been practicing lemon law for 30 years my office is not far from detroit so we've got the big three right there uh they love me i've been seeing them for 30 years so people often ask me about the lemon law what is it how does it work but then they all say are there really that many bad cars out there and i say oh yeah in fact it's you know it's kept me busy for 30 years people go well lawyers file lawsuits how bad can these cars be well let me give you some examples i had a client once whose little dodge the little daytonas they came out with in the late 80s early 90s went through seven engines seven engines the guy calls me up says hey steve i got a car i think it's a lemon i go why is it he goes it's on its seventh engine right now and i said okay why didn't you call me three engines ago but the point is that he came into my office and he puts the repair orders on my desk you can't argue with repairers engine blows up replaced engine blows up replaced seven engines and so i follow the lawsuit on this and chrysler buys it back instantly they pay my attorney fees so everyone's happy everyone wins and then you might ask yourself but wait a second why would a brand new car go through seven engines and then you understand one of the reasons that lemons exist it's not that the car was bad it's not that the engines were bad there's no way that they actually grabbed replacement engines at random and they were all bad there was something else going on and i've spoken to people who are zone reps who represent the factories and interface with the dealerships and i've spoken to mechanics and i've spoken all these different people as different levels in these dealerships and they say here's the problem of modern corporate automotive america dealership sells a car car comes back for warranty work the manufacturer is going to pay for the warranty work but they will only authorize so much work for oh i don't know diagnosis and analysis and then when it comes to actually doing the repair so they can't just say we want to do this or want to do that they got to call and get it approved and what was happening in that particular case was there was something else that was causing problems and they were replacing the short block only so a short block for the non-car guys in the audience is the middle part of the engine and is the stuff that gets attached to the short block and it can vary from engine to engine but they might for instance be taking parts off the old engine and putting them on the short block for the new engine and the part that they're putting on could be what's causing the engine failure so somebody somewhere looking at this warranty history as this car comes in over and over again should have said wait there's no way that this guy got two engines three engines four engines in a row that are bad but what happened was the mechanic would go well it's got a blown engine he called get some work authorized they go you get 15 minutes of diagnosis throw in another short block he should have said wait a second short block ain't gonna do it because you keep blowing up short blocks for whatever reason that call either didn't get made or didn't get approved so somewhere down the road they buy this vehicle back after it's gone through seven engines but the point is car was a lemon what caused that vehicle become a lemon well there was something wrong with the original engine but it was not diagnosed properly so interestingly enough the manufacturer is who's going to buy a vehicle back on the glamour not the dealership so sometimes you'll find that dealerships don't even really care if your vehicle becomes a lemon i actually know a guy who is a service manager a major dealership in michigan who's going to stack my business cards and he hands them out to people and walk up very casually go by the way call this guy your car's a lemon so it happens the thing with the lemon law is it's very specific your vehicle has got to be in the shot so many times within so many years and it varies from state to state all 50 states have got lemon laws so in some states it's got to be in the shop like michigan four times basically that it cannot be repaired but the first time within the first year and then all four within the first two years so if your first defect occurs at day 366 it's not going to qualify as a lemon very very specific things like that now if the car's got a warranty it's got a problem does otherwise it cover it like a magnus and moss warranty x but the point is that lemons have these very very specific designations like that so for instance i had a client driving on the freeway in detroit and the steering wheels brand new car fell off in his lap so he very quickly jams it back on and pulls the car to the side of the road and as he regains his composure as we say you know what's he going to do now so he shuts the car off and before cell phones walks calls a dealership dealership comes and gets it and they go oh yeah your steering wheel fell off because a nut came undone we tightened it for you well now my client doesn't want to drive that car again rightfully so because he almost died the last time he did because the steering wheel fell off in his lap guess what one repair attempt and in michigan that's not a 11-wall claim now there again are other laws that we pursued it we actually get the car bought back but some states have a third prong so the first prong is it spends four times in the shop first two years second prong is it spends 30 days in the shop in the first year third prong in some states is it has multiple failures of a safety related system so your brakes fail a couple times that might be a lemon in some states your steering wheel falls off in your lap the scary part is it's going to happen more than once so you know i i would have a hard time as an attorney advising you take it out if it falls off again call me back that's a defective car a lot of people call that a lemon but it's not a lemon in the true sense of michigan's lemon law i get phone calls about a lot of defective products and there was actually a point in time where i'd represent anybody if they called me with a defective product i'd never handled before so i've represented people who've bought cars trucks snowmobiles personal watercraft atvs sewing machines things of that nature so i get a lot of phone calls about rvs and and i got bad news for the people out there who are thinking about buying their first rv don't unless you really know what you're getting into rvs in most states do not have lemon law coverage you can drop six figures on rv it can cost more than your house and you can drive it down the road with no lemon law coverage in most states so i've had people buy a quarter of a million dollar rvs that don't run 150 000 rvs that leak whenever it rains bad news about an rv is it tends to be parked outdoors so the rain is a problem i had a guy who bought a quarter of a million dollar rv that caught on fire if he drove it over 50 miles an hour so he's driving down the road he just bought this thing brand new and people are pulling alongside of him honking and pointing which is not a good thing when people are doing that to you on the road so he pulls over the side the road he gets out and there's smoke coming off of the rear axle of this gigantic quarter of a million dollar motorhome so it's smoke but it's smoldering it's not actually burning in that sense it was something to do with the bearings so i think he may have hit with a fire extinguisher but i don't know and then he calls the manufacturer and goes i'm out in the middle of nowhere uh what do i do they go bring it to one of our facilities he goes well it starts smoking when i do 50 and they go well drive it slower so he brings it into a repair facility that's authorized to repair these vehicles they tear the axle apart and they go yeah there's a bearing back there that smoke will replace the bearing for you they replace the bearings put it all back together again paid for by the manufacturer gets it starts driving down the road starts smoking again he went through that process several times and discovered he could never drive it over 50 without the axle smoking so he would call the manufacture up those guys this is not acceptable they go why and he goes every time i drive it over 50 the axle starts smoking they go well every time you've complained we fixed it and their position was if it happens again we'll fix it because the cost of slapping in a new set of bearings wasn't that much the problem is it wasn't the bearings it was something else where the bearings were seated it could have been something with the axle i don't know but that's not your job as the consumer to figure that stuff out so we had to file a lawsuit on that we actually got that one worked out in court also but the funny thing was that in litigation we have to hire an expert mechanic i know a certified master who inspects vehicles from me he figured the problem out almost instantly because it's not the bearings because the axle screwed up and it came out that the rv manufacturer that builds the house unit doesn't build the chassis that she has to come with a separate manufacturer so it winds up being that there's three different defendants and they're all pointing their fingers at each other and that happens a lot unfortunately with complex things like that lemon law also does not cover commercial vehicles i've had people buy six-figure over-the-road trucks owner operators who bought their own truck with their own money and the things break down and they said bring it back in we'll work on it yeah but when you're working on it i'm not making any money oh that's too bad we had you sign a disclaimer at the front end of this thing you can't sue us for lost wages and guess what the guy's got the thing in the shop for months at a time while they're working on it trying to fix it and you know that's the problem you got i had a guy who bought a car a used car young man recently married young family working very very hard but he was a little hard up financially and he bought a used car from a very very reputable car dealer in oakland county just north of detroit michigan and he came out the car one day and he couldn't get the door open on the driver's side so he walks around the passenger side can't get that door open either it's kind of strange and so he had just bought the vehicle but it's used see and lemon law does not cover used cars but he's got to get something done he needs the car to get to and from work so he calls the dealership they go well we just sold the car we'll take a look at they tow the car in and they give them a little bit of a run run around and finally they go well you know the car was traded into us and it's not covered by any warranty but um we can show you what's wrong with it and of course it was a car that had been frankenstein it was cut at the firewall the front end was from one car the back end from another car and somebody had gone to a junkyard and said hey wait a second that front end will fit that back end bought both cars saw them in half weld them together and once you pop the hood and look you can see the weld that went all the way around inside there basically holding the front end and the back end together and of course as you drive it over time as those welds start to break the car starts to do this and you can't open the doors and the scary part about that of course is the dealership goes well we sold it to you as is you can't go after us then the problem of course is there's some other issues with you know but the guy who traded it in um we wound up actually getting that vehicle bought back because there's laws like misrepresentation and fraud and so on if people don't disclose things they knew or should have known and the question is does the dealership really not notice that a car has been cut in half and stuck together again and the funny thing is when i saw that case when i saw that car i actually saw the car with my own eyes i remember thinking like wow who who does something like this and after talking about other people say oh i've heard of that before it's not that uncommon so there are guys out there who are very very talented mechanically who can do these kinds of things and there's other guys that go yeah and if we do this we can sell it make a bunch of money the question of course is whether those whole whether the welds are going to last or not one of the other crazier things in my career is i've handled hundreds if not thousands of lemon law law suits i've actually represented several people more than once where they actually bought a bad car a few years later they bought another bad car it's very unusual most cars are not lemons so it doesn't happen very often but on one occasion i represented the same truck twice and a client of mine bought a brand new ford pickup truck it had some problems and ford very very quickly bought it back thank you very much paid my client off paid my attorney fees everyone's happy a few months goes by and i get a really cryptic phone call a woman goes hi i'm calling you um about a used truck i just bought and i started to tell her the lemon law does not cover used trucks she says well you're going to hear about this one i go why is that she said because it was owned by your former client and she tells the name of my client i said how did you know that she goes well the truck's got all kinds of mechanical problems as you know and i took it to dealership that i bought it from and one of their write-up people pulled me aside and said uh i'm not sure how you got this truck but that truck was just bought back under the lemon law and i eventually figured this out but the way most car companies work at least at that time in michigan if they bought something back under the lemon law they would buy it back and michigan does not brand the titles as lemon buybacks some states do maybe 12 states but michigan does not the manufacturers would take those bought back lemons to an auction and sell them to car dealers as a closed auction only for car dealers and they would ship the car with a notice saying this vehicle was bought back under the lemon law here's what was wrong with it here's what we did to fix it and they'll extend the warranty on that and that's supposed to travel with the vehicle and so this vehicle got bought at auction by the same dealership that sold it the first time so they got to sell the same vehicle a second time so there's a thing in the law that says at a corporation like that the business the dealership they've got knowledge they knew this thing was a lemon law buyback they didn't disclose that to buyer number two but they also didn't give her the document saying this is a lemonade buyback so in doing so they broke their agreement with ford as part of their dealership agreement so i got to call up a buddy of mine at the time in the legal department at ford and say guess what i got the same vehicle you got to buy it back a second time and i've had people say but steve it's not their fault well no but they're going to get the money back from the dealership because the dealership broke the agreement because the agreement was if you buy this vehicle from us at this auction and resell it you must pass along this document and i later spoke to my guy and i said i'm curious what happened and he goes when they returned the documents to ford to indicate that this vehicle had been sold to a second buyer that document was mysteriously left blank and because i think they were doing it to make it look like we'd notified her and we just forgot to fill out the paperwork if you get a speeding ticket or other traffic citation don't just pay it it can involve costly insurance premium increases points on your license possible suspensions and a lot of other inconveniences and when you fight it you want the right people on your side that means finding a local lawyer to wherever you got the ticket even if it's in your backyard or on a road trip or wherever off the record is the best way to find the best attorney they pair you with a local attorney wherever you get the ticket to fight for you and achieve the best outcome in most cases you won't even have to appear so be sure to check them out at the link in the description below and download their free app you just take a picture of your ticket and they handle the rest so be sure to check them out and thank them for their support of ben wiki [Applause] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 758,001

Rating: 4.9520473 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Lehto, Steve Letho, Lemon Law, Lawyer, Attorney, lemon, car dealer, car dealer law, maintenance, repairs, vinwiki, car stories

Id: ZPy75J9Po8U

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021