You are probably wondering what you would get from a lemon law buy back. Basicly, you will recover all of the money that you put into your lemon vehicle, minus an offset for usage. In addition to the money paid directly to the consumer, the bank will be paid off, if there is money owing on the sale/lease contract.
It’s time to calculate your potential recovery. In order to illistrate a lemon law buy back, let’s use Orange County Carl as an example. Orange County Carl buys a new sportscar from a Newport Beach dealership for $80,000.00. Carl pays $20,000.00 down, with payments of $1,000 per month. Carl drives his “baby” for a year without incident before he experiences a knock from the engine to which he returns the vehicle to the dealership for repair under warranty. Upon his first presentation of the engine knock, Carl’s sportscar had 8,000 miles. After 6 months and 4 failed repair attempts, the manufacturer of Carl’s sportscar decides to buy back the defective vehicle under the California lemon law. So after 18 months, Carl had driven the defective car 15,000 miles, and paid out a total of $38,000.00, with more than $40,000.00 still owed to the bank under the sales contract.
In order to calculate how much Orange County Carl will recover for a statutory buy back of his lemon car, you first need to determine the mileage at the first presentation of Carl’s lemon car for repair of the defect. Here, that number is 8,000. Next you would divide said number by 120,000 (which represents the expected life of a new motor vehicle in miles.) Then you would multiply that number by the purchase price of the vehicle ($80,000.00.) The result of that calculation would be Carl’s offset. Carl would like to get all his money back but the California legislature decided that a California consumer should not recover monies for usage of a lemon vehicle prior to the inception of the defect that gives rise to the lemon law buy back.
So here is Carl’s calculation: 8,000 divided by 120,000 = .0666666. Now multiply .666666 X 80,000 = 5,333.33. So Orange County Carl’s offset is $5,333.33. Therefore, under this lemon law buy back scenerio, Carl is entitled to receive $32,666.67 from the manufacturer of his defective car ($38,000.00 minus $5,333.33.) To complete the lemon law buy back, the manufacturer will pay the bank the full amount still owed under the sales contract.
Good deal for Orange County Carl, as we would not take one dime of Carl’s $32,666.67, because our contingency fees are paid for in addition to his lemon law buy back proceeds.
I hope that Orange County Carl helps you to calculate your own potential lemon law buy back figures.