Automobile Lemon Laws

Sometimes, the cars have serious problems that cannot be easily fixed. If a dealer cannot fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time, it is likely you are the owner of a lemon .In most states that will be a permanent mark on the cars title. You may not know what to do if you find yourself the brand new owner of a problematic lemon. However, there are often things that can be done to help if you know where to look.

Most states have their own sets of automobile lemon laws. This way, no matter what state you purchase the car in, you have some form of protection against acquiring a lemon automobile. The laws concerning lemon cars vary from state to state and some are more comprehensive than others .Depending on which state the lemon vehicle is purchased in, you may have up to a year or more to return it to the dealer for a full refund of the purchase price. The details and steps you need to follow to validate your car as a lemon also vary by state and some of these make it difficult to prove without the help of a lawyer. Regardless of whether or not you have legal help when it comes to a lemon, you should know ahead of time what automobile lemon laws apply in your state.

What Are Lemon Laws?

Lemon laws are the pieces of legislation that each state has enacted to help protect the consumer from the practice of selling cars that have one or more major imperfection which cannot be readily corrected, but was not apparent prior to the sale. These can be anything from mechanical flaws, to human error in the production process, to poor fitment of parts. They can even include tooling problems such as parts that are the wrong shape or size, or even chemical related defects.

Ways Around Them

Despite the laws that exist regarding the automotive lemon laws, car makers and their dealerships go to great lengths to avoid taking back lemon cars. They have many tricks they utilize. The most common is called the good faith buyback. This is where a car maker realizes that they have a lemon law car on their hands, but rather than go through the lemon law process, they offer to buy back the car from the owner in good faith, this prevents the car from showing up on the radar as a lemon and keeps its title status clean so they can resell it later. In states that make this too difficult, they will often move the car out of state and sell it there, which often allows them to keep a clean title. Another practice is the standard of only making perspective buyers aware of one or two of multiple issues that contributed to the cars lemon status. Some dealers even go to such lengths as arranging the paper work so that the warning on the lemon law agreement is obscured and only the signature line is visible. This way they can get a signed disclosure notice without you having been aware of it. The worst dealers will even try shadier tricks, such as asking the customer to pay for the mileage they accrued on the car after it is bought back as a lemon.

How Do They Vary From State To State?

Lemon laws vary a great deal from state to state. In most cases, what varies is how much the laws pack in the way of teeth. Some states like Ohio, require very strict compliance of their auto lemon laws, while others have line of code or so, saying little more than how long the car can go before it is no longer covered by the lemon laws in that state. Most of these laws have expiration date in time or mileage where they no longer have to cover damage to the car even if it came from the car manufacture.

Where To Find More Information Online?

There are many good places on the internet to begin finding out more details on automotive lemon laws. Some good places to start looking are listed below.

Lemon Law Help.net

This site offers information about lemon laws and much more. They offer the specifics of what the lemon laws are for each state. They also have a good explanation of what can constitute a lemon, as well as links to articles about lemon laws, questions commonly ask about lemon laws and other lemon law info .They have links to attorneys as well if you need to find one to help with your lemon law complaint. Their site can be located at http://www.lemonlawhelp.net.

Car Lemon.com

This is an interesting site full of good lemon law information. It has the standard explanation of what automotive lemon laws are and then gives a breakdown of all 50 states .Within each state category; there are links to the local lemon laws, lemon law attorneys, and the state attorney general. For some states there is even more information, such as arbitration forms and other pertinent documents. They also have the very interesting feature of offering a free lemon law case evaluation. This is along with auto maker recalls and vehicle repair tips .For more information, you can go to their site at http://www.carlemon.com.

Lemon Law.com

This site offers the standard information about auto lemon laws from each state. They offer information in Spanish as well for the non-English speaking crowd. They have blog on their site full of information about auto lemon laws as well as an interesting section which allows you to post lemon law questions on their site. Their site can be found at http://www.lemonlaw.com.