Who does the lemon law protect?
Many consumers have experienced buying merchandizes but later discover that whatever they bought does not live up to the standards that they expected. This is how lemon laws came about; to protect consumers from bad deals. Traditionally the lemon laws are invoked in vehicle sales-gone-sour but they apply to all commercial merchandize that are sold with warranties.
The law is used to protect new car buyers as well as old car buyers. The laws provide remedies for buyers who may have bought cars with defects, regardless of whether the seller was aware of the defects or not. Most of the lemon laws across the states provide for the recovery of legal bills in case one decides to pursue the matter in a court of law, and this is the case if one sues under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. One is only able to recover attorney fees if one wins the case. In some states, the car owner will be required to pay the legal fees for the manufacturer/seller in case he loses the case.
Ostensibly this works to protect the sellers from vexatious lawsuits. From that perspective, lemon laws can also said to protect car sellers to some extent. The Attorney fee is solely dependent on time expended rather than on the contingency basis.
If a consumer buys an automobile which turns out to be a lemon, and let’s perhaps assume here that it’s not brand new, there are two scenarios that might arise and the affected person may pursue his rights under the lemon laws as discussed. The first one is that the buyer would be compensated for the automobile’s total price if the warranty included; a manufacturer’s certification-This usually means that the automobile left the manufacturer’s lines in less than one year.
If you had an extended warranty through to the manufacturer, or that the warranty by the manufacturer was still effective when the buyer purchased the car from a third party (most manufacturer’s warranties last for a period of five years), the buyer would still be eligible to recover the purchase price if the car turns out to be a lemon.
The second scenario would be that the buyer would still be in a position to recover the purchase price of a lemon even when there was no manufacturer’s warranty if; the automobile had been involved in a natural disaster, or has a rolled bask odometer, or has stolen parts, or has a history of mechanical problems which the seller knew about.
Lemon laws, however, will not be successfully invoked if the automobile was bought on a “as is” basis, which generally is the way most second hand cars are sold. Buyers should be aware that a car bought in this manner transfers the risk from the seller to the buyer and the latter will be responsible for any defect that is thereafter detected.
As alluded to in the introduction, lemon laws may be mostly used in relation to cars, and the buyers are the beneficiaries under the laws, but they are by no means the only ones. These days, buyers of items such as motorcycles, wheelchairs, boat, computers and even some pets may invoke lemon laws if their purchases turn out to be much less than they bargained for.
References
- http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Lemon-Laws-Protect-Consumers&id=623933
- http://wealthsmith.com/lemon-law-articles-6.htm
- http://wealthsmith.com/lemon-law-articles.htm