Vechiles Covered In New York Lemon Laws

If you think that your vehicle has a car defect, you may have wondered whether or not it is covered by New York lemon laws. Perhaps you’ve considered seeking lemon law advice from an attorney, or maybe you’ve just been perusing the web. In any case, here is some information you should know if you think you’ve made a lemon purchase and have a defective car.

First, realize that New York’s new car lemon law doesn’t only cover cars. It also covers motorcycles and motor homes. Indeed, a car doesn’t have to be brand new in order to be covered under NY’s new car lemon law; it can be a demonstrator model, or it can be a used car – providing it has fewer than 18,000 miles on the odometer and is less than two years old.

Similarly, if the car has a defect, automobile laws in New York state that the lemon law applies even it has been leased. The one stipulation is that the vehicle must be used primarily for personal or household purposes. In other words, the lemon law doesn’t apply to business vehicles. That’s not to say, however, that you can’t have ever used the car for work; the law says that you have to use it more than 50 percent of the time for personal use.

If you’re fairly certain that you have a lemon on your hands, it’s important to contact a New York lemon law attorney. At lemonjustice.com, there is a team of attorneys standing by who can help guide you through the process of convincing the manufacturer to do a lemon buyback and refund your money or provide you with a comparable replacement vehicle.

In the meantime, it’s important to gather all of the documentation you can to prove that you’ve taken the vehicle in for repair and that the problem still hasn’t been fixed. NY lemon says that the manufacturer or dealer has four tries to fix the problem. If the problem still isn’t repaired, or if your vehicle has been out of service for a total of 30 calendar days, it can be declared a lemon. So, you should keep all of the paperwork from each repair attempt. If the dealer failed to give you a service receipt, he’s in violation of the law. If you ask for a copy, he should provide it to you. In addition, keep copies of any correspondence you have with the dealer or manufacturer, as well as a log of your phone calls and other communications with the dealer or manufacturer.

One of our clients has what we think of as the ultimate lemon motorcycle. He took it into the shop untold times, for a number of problems, and the so-called repairs only seemed to make the problems multiply. Over the summer, the bike was in the shop for over 30 days, after which it started having transmission problems. Plus, they refused to give our client the repair-related paperwork. In the meantime, the repair shop isn’t taking responsibility for the problems they caused, and despite the owner calling the manufacturer more than a dozen times, the manufacturer wasn’t responsive.

Once we took the case, we contacted the manufacturer and they responded with an astounding allegation…that the defects in the motorcycle were due to our client’s weight. We thought we’d heard every story imaginable, but this one was the topper.

Give us a break. In this country, people who weigh considerably more than average are subjected to myriad stereotypes and discrimination. They’re discriminated against in employment, education, access to public accommodations, and access to adequate medical care. They also face a tremendous amount of societal prejudice. Now, according to Kawasaki, they’re also to blame for defective motorcycles? Yeah, right.

P.S. They bought the bike back, at our urging.