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"I chose your firm because everyone I spoke to said you are known as the authorities on California Lemon Law. The service you provide reflects this."
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What is a Lemon Car?
Check to see if any of these options apply to your car.
If they do, you may have a case:
- rough idle
- transmission
- rough shifting
- stalling
- check engine light on
- vehicle surges
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 Lemon Law Wins
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Precedent Setting Lemon Law Wins
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The Lemon Motor Home
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Lots of Misery, Damn Little Recreation
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If you have heard that you can't take legal action when you have a lemon Motor Home (RV),
disregard it. An motor home manufacturer with quality problems probably spread
that rumor. In California, your lemon motor home absolutely qualifies under the
Song-Beverly Act, California's tough lemon law statutes. And believe it, a lot
of them are in trouble for truly awful workmanship.
You've heard the expression, "Just when I thought nothing
else could go wrong, it did." This is too often the case with motor home lemon
vehicles. It's a problem of multiple manufacturers being responsible for what
is finally delivered to the customer. When Ford or GM builds and sells an
automobile, generally they take responsibility - as much as they take
responsibility for anything - for the whole vehicle. With a motor home this is
not the case.
Here's a possible list of major components built and separately warranted by different
manufacturers:
- Engine – Cummins Diesel
- Transmission – Allison/GM
- Chassis – Freightliner
- Coach –Fleetwood (and many others)
Various components of the finished product have their own warranties. Appliances are a
good example. GE might make the refrigerator and Sears the stove. These
manufacturers warrant their own products.
Many of the components, large and small, are in some way interconnected mechanically,
electrically, even electronically. The transmission connects to the Engine. The
engine is mounted on the chassis, the coach is mounted to the chassis and
covers the engine and around and around we go. The hipbone is connected to the
thighbone, the thighbone is connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone is
connected to the anklebone, so goes the old song.
What happens when something goes wrong? What happens when
one or more of these interconnected components has a malfunction? Who is
responsible? Who steps forward? In an ethical world, a world where honesty is
the rule, mechanics and manufacturer's representatives of the various
components would figure it out and the maker of the malfunctioning part would
step forward. The responsible person would say, "It's my component that failed,
Mr. and Mrs. Jones. We'll get right on it and fix it."
This isn't the way of the world.
If you, as an owner of a motor home, find yourself in this situation, you will
get to watch a lot of company representatives behave very badly indeed. Nowhere
outside of a police holding cell will you see greater efforts by the various
manufacturers representatives to blame each other. Responsibility among the
various manufacturers is as foreign as political integrity in Washington D.C.
Motor homes are susceptible to the same problems experienced in automobiles and also problems
that are uniquely found in motor homes. Like the modern automobile, motor homes
make use of computers to control the various vehicle systems. The difference is
that a motor home is a combination truck, (chassis and diesel engine),
residence (has many of the qualities of a home such as rooms, showers,
appliances, walls, decorative elements, etc.) and it's a lot like a bus. It's
big!
There are also
special characteristics unique to RVs. Think about rooms that extend out of the
side of the coach, and portable bathrooms. The possibility for really
unpleasant problems abound.
We see it
happen time and time again. The manufacturer does the right business thing.
They innovate; they put their creative people to work developing neat things to
catch the buyer's interest. This is a good business approach to take. It is how
American businesses stay ahead of the competitive curve. They send out their
survey people to discover what the consumer wants and then do their damndest to
provide it. Now, with the latest innovation in hand, the designers meet the production people.
Often these meetings resemble, human meets bug-eyed alien. The innovators are
high on how cool it all is, and production is thinking, "How in God's name can
we build that! It's going to cost a fortune."
A
good example in the motor home world is the "slide out". A slide out is
essentially a electro-mechanical method whereby a room in the RV is made bigger
by extending it out from the side of the vehicle. See Figure 1 for an example
of a typical slide out. It's a great idea that loses much in the translation
from design to production. Very, very few slide outs are without some sort of
problem.
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Figure 1. Slide Out Room Extension on 5th Wheel RV
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We have seen in previous articles that many of
the problems were related to electric/electronic systems. In the motor home we
see all of the electrical and electronic problems plus the mechanical. This is
not surprising. Remember the motor home is a vehicle trying to be a house.
Workmanship comes up over an over in the defects listed. Generally, if you buy
a new sedan you are not worried that it will leak like a sieve in the first
rain shower. Motor homes frequently have problems with leaks, especially around
and in the slide out.
At least when you buy a house, barring
earthquakes and tornadoes, it is meant to stay in one place. Anyone who lives
in California knows what happens to the house when the earth begins to shake.
The house is twisted in all sorts of directions. Afterward, cracks appear,
doors are out of plumb, plaster falls, foundations warp and maybe the roof
develops a leak.
When you drive an motor home all over the country, over roads in various states of
disrepair, you are creating a kind of continuous earthquake effect on the
vehicle, on your portable house. We see the results in lemon motor homes all
the time. Those that were designed with these effects in mind, come through
none the worse for the wear. Others, where the driving force in production and
they did everything as cheap as possible, manifest all the problems you'd
expect after an earthquake and some that are unique to motor homes.
The following is a list of typical problems from RV Owners. I have not included the name of the Manufacturers, as this is
being written after the fact, and who knows, maybe they have gotten their act
together (skeptical look). In one year an owner reported the following problems
with his 32-foot class C deluxe 5th wheel RV:
Electrical outlets pop out of the wall
Two entire
panels pull away from their frames due to inferior thickness of the substrate
and the necessary spacers to hold them together in the range of humidity that
any trailer experiences.
Panels bowed for
the same reason
The slideouts
have pulled the paneling away from the face wall when the slideout is pulled
in, because ragged sheet metal edges of the slideout have dug into the panel
due to mismatched surfaces
After extending
the slide out, couldn't get it back in, had to pry it back in with a 2 X 4
plank
Easy chair replaced
because the upholstery separated from the frame and allowed the padding to slip
down.
The center slider
section of the screen door will not stay in, due to poor quality control of the
space in the center of the door.
The water pump which
comes standard on this 32 foot trailer puts out 20 lbs of pressure which isn't
enough to get water out of a PUR faucet filter less than 20 feet away.
Necessary to
supplement the heat in the upper bedroom with a space heater because the blower
and ductwork is inadequate to get enough heat to the room.
The shower cracked,
the roof leaked, the canopy broke,
The toilet lid has
broken off
Electrical problems
and on and on...
And after all this, you have the
things people say about the quality of service from so-called authorized
dealers. I can't say them here and have this article remain "G" rated.
One aspect of lemon law is how
many days the vehicle must remain at the shop for repairs during the warranty
period. Thirty days is the standard in the statute for a lemon vehicle. It is
not unusual for lemon motor homes to be in the shop for two and three months,
even longer during the warranty period.
Here's the key language. It defines a lemon as:
Vehicles that continue to have a defect that substantially impairs the use, value,
or safety of the vehicle after a reasonable number of attempts to repair
the vehicle – 4 attempts in California for non-safety related issues - or after
the vehicle has been out of service for a particular number of days.
Substantial is from the viewpoint of the owner, not the manufacturer.
Having
the slideout extend in traffic while some speed-crazed Peterbilt driver bears
down on you is not safe. Bailing water out of your vehicle after every rain
shower is not considered the best use of the vehicle. This might also be
thought to decrease the value of the vehicle. If the weight distribution toward
the rear of the vehicle is so poor it feels like the front end is a foot off ground,
this seems substantial to us. This is very definitely a safety issue. I could
go on for a long time.
What is the bottom line? Don't put up with it. Get legal assistance. The law allows you to get a refund or a replacement.
Although after your experiences with your lemon RV, you may want to buy an M1A1
Abrams tank and pay a visit to the manufacturer.
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Presumption and the Lemon Law