Yahoo Autos Scariest Car Stories From 25 Years of Lemon Law Practice
Gather 'round: I'm going to tell you some frightening car stories from my vaults. All of these are true but they might give you the willies.
What better way to start than with a FrankenCar? I had a client who bought a small red sports car from a dealer in Rochester, Michigan. It was late-model and seemed in decent shape. Shortly after he bought it, he could not open the doors. Not just one door: both doors. After some poking around and consulting experts, it was noted that the car had been cut in half at the firewall–or rather, it had been put together there from two cars. One had been rear-ended and one had run into some wall-like object. And an enterprising person had gone to the junkyard and seen the two cars and said, "Hey, I can mate the front half of that car with the back half of that one." He then traded it in to the dealer who sold it to my guy. The reason the doors wouldn't open? The welds were breaking and the car was slowly buckling. Litigation ensued (just assume from here on out, litigation is the end of each of these stories).
I tell this one whenever asked about "bad dealer" stories. Client brought her Corvette with only a few thousand miles on the clock to have a loose mirror tightened. She left it and later, wondered why the dealer was keeping her car for so long. She called and–sensing that the nervous dealer guy was lying to her when he said the mirror adjustment was just taking a long time–raced to the dealer to find out the truth. There, she found her car with three flattened tires and scrape marks running from the front bumper, up the hood, and down the deck lid. The convertible top was ripped backwards. A porter had taken it for a joyride in the rain, lost control of it like a Mustang driver at a Cars and Coffee, jumped a curb and run it under a chain link fence. The mirror was still loose.
One client bought a brand new truck and as he pulled away from the dealer he turned on the defrosters. A piece of glass shot out of one of the ducts and hit him in the eye. He managed to pull over and call 911. Turns out the truck had its window broken out during delivery and they had vacuumed the seats, dash and carpeting, but hadn't thought to remove the glass shards from the ducts.
RVs and boats could have their own spooky holiday but the scariest RV story I've ever had was the one which cost my client almost a quarter of a million dollars and the rear axle would catch fire whenever he drove it more than 50 miles. He'd pull it over, extinguish it, let it cool off, and then call a dealer. Where they'd replace pretty much everything you can think of–and it would do it again. Pretty much all he did was take it from dealer to dealer. The manufacturer's response? "Keep bringing it back in. We'll fix it!"
One client had his car eat seven engines. That is the only way to describe it. The engine would blow, the dealer would replace it, that one would blow. Yes, I know–It wasn't the engines. It was probably something else that wasn't being replaced when they replaced the block each time. But because the manufacturer and the dealer simply replaced the short block each time, it continued chewing up engines and spitting them out (until the manufacturer bought the car back).
Oil change horror stories? How much time have you got? My client(s) have/had the shop fail to put the oil/filter/plug back in (or on properly) after the oil change causing the car to die anywhere from the parking lot to a few miles down the road. And the reason they came to me was that the shops that do this usually offer to make it good by "Let us fix it!" Would anyone in their right mind really let the shop that forgot to put oil during an oil change attempt to repair the damage they caused?
It's a scary world out their folks, especially for our cars.
Steve Lehto is a writer and attorney from Michigan. He specializes in Lemon Law and frequently writes about cars and the law. His most recent books include Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow, and Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird: Design, Development, Production and Competition. He also has a podcast where he talks about these things.
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