What happened to this post? I see the topic but no first post.
Not sure what you’re asking specifically, but in general, yes there is such a thing as a car that can be declared a “lemon”.
Most states have laws governing this sort of thing that are along the lines of: “If the customer has to visit the dealer more than X times to fix the same problem, or a problem remains unfixed after X amount of time or visits, then the company must buy the car back from the customer.”
If the question is “do people actually picket dealerships or paint the word ‘lemon’ on their cars?,” yes, I have seen both.
If the question is, “do cars made on Mondays suck worst than those made on other days of the week?” I can tell you that whether or not it’s true, there are definitely some people who believe it.
Back in my dealership days, I was asked more than once to run a Vehicle Master Inquiry on various Mercedes-Benzes by detail-obsessed people who were interested in finding out the date–and thus the day of the week–on which a particular car rolled off the assembly line. This was important to some people. Maybe such things are important. If someone’s smart enough to afford a Benz, they might just know something I don’t.
The thing is, I can’t remember whether or not such information was actually recorded in the VMI records. Shows how smart I am.
Sofa King: I have a screenshot of the system GM uses to track car manufacturing for my car, and it does tell me when the car was completed. (Hmm. Friday, at 4:16pm…is that bad? :))
MILLER TIME! Woo hoo!
If the question is “Was there ever a car sold under the brand name ‘Lemon’?”, then this may have come from the French car maker Citroen. I’m not a French speaker, but I think “Citroen” is very close to the French word for “lemon”. (The car is actually named after a person, IIRC. “Mr. Citroen”, if you will.)
“If someone’s smart enough to afford a Benz, they might just know something I don’t.”
Mercedes accepts brain cells in payment?
What I was trying to say was, statistically speaking, a “lemon” should be pretty rare! If you assume that quality levels on modern car components are pretty high (say the probability of failure of items like alternators is around 0.1% in any given year). If you assume about the same failure rate for the fuel injection system, and let’s say the brakes fail around 0.001%, then the probablilty of SIMULTANEOUS failure should be around less than one chance in 100 billion. This probabilty is too small to ever happen.
So, are “lemon” mostly urban legends?
ralph124c, the server seems to have eaten your post, so I’ll close this thread and invite you to try again.
Saved by the bell.
Well that is assuming that the various failures are independent. If for some reason the car is assembled poorly because Bob did not have his mind on the job that day. It is reasonable to think that he might screw up more than one thing. Or maybe the reason the alternator fails is because a belt is miss aligned. This will perhaps cause the AC to fail a little while later. Or the Engine mounts were done improperly cause stress to all manor of things. Pinched wire harness could cause lots of problems to a diverse set of things.
http://www.auto.com/industry/ford16_20020516.htm
The above link talks about Toyota having 115 defects per 100 cars and being the best. GM was 146 but thinks it get to low 130s per 100. So it seems something being wrong with your car when you buy it is about 1.3% or there abouts.
The Volvo C70 that my wife bought spent a lot of time in the shop initially. It flat out died on us 3 days after buying it. There were some problems with the buttons that operated windows and door locks. They all seem to be fixed now, but at the time we were pretty pissed at the way the dealership handled the problems. We finally went to a different dealership to rectify the problems.
Here is the 1998 report of the New York New Car Lemon Law.