The necessity for protecting consumers with the lemon law continues to be demonstrated—and not just in the US. China has had an auto recall system in place since 2004, and the system now has to be utilized in the recall of nearly 700,000 Toyota passenger cars with defects in their electric window systems. The faulty equipment can apparently lead to malfunctions, short circuits or even fires.

When a consumer is having a problem with a vehicle defect, the first course of action is always to take the vehicle into the dealer. Dealers have numerous methods of deflecting lemon law claims, however, and much of the time will go out of their ways to “prove” to a consumer that there really is no defect.

Although it may not be intended as such, one such deflective method is that of computer diagnosis. It is not because the dealer isn’t performing diagnosis—it’s that diagnosis is usually ineffective.

“Diagnostic tools in the repair shop seldom find the problem,” said leading California lemon law attorney Norman Taylor. “They only point in the general direction. In fact, during diagnostic tests, a significant percentage of defective electrical and electronic parts typically pass, returning ‘no fault found’ codes even though they are defective.”

Taylor knows of what he speaks. He has been a lemon law specialist since 1987, and he and his firm, Norman Taylor and Associates, have handled over 8,000 cases for consumers with a 98 percent success rate. He is one of the leading lemon law attorneys in southern and all of California.

“Additionally, many electrical and drivability problems on today’s automobiles are intermittent,” Taylor added. “Not all technicians can troubleshoot problems accurately. Of those, only a portion can troubleshoot intermittent and more difficult problems.”

This of course means that numerous repair attempts can result in the dealer saying, “No problem found,” leaving the consumer with a defective vehicle and no solution.

For this reason and many others, the most effective action a consumer can take, when a lemon car (aka, a lemon) is suspected, is to contact a qualified lemon law attorney right away.