Consumer Law

Lemon Law Support: Technical Service Bulletins

By Kemnitzer, Anderson, Barron, Ogilvie & Brewer

Car defects are less of a mystery than they used to be. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) provides a source of information useful to investigation of Lemon Law complaints that was not readily available to consumers before the Internet Age. This includes Technical Service Bulletins.

The California Lemon Law requires every auto manufacturer to have authorized repair shops in this state, to carry out the terms of its warranties. In the absence of exclusive authorized dealers, a manufacturer can designate independent dealers to satisfy this requirement of the Lemon Law. As a further measure of consumer protection, the law requires that auto manufacturers have to make replacement parts available and they have to make service literature available to instruct their dealers how to make repairs.

Thus Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, BMW and all other car manufacturers maintain written instructions with regard to known defects, nonconformities and conditions likely to be the subject of requested repairs. These are called TSB?s, or Technical Service Bulletins. When we started representing consumers in the 1980s, it was very difficult to obtain these internal records. Even after lawsuits were filed, the car companies refused to give these up without court orders, making the litigation unnecessarily expensive. Now however, the Internet makes an enormous amount of information readily available through government and other sources. It is important to realize that these sources are often incomplete, and discovery in the course of litigation is still needed to supplement these investigative tools. Still, it is useful to see what is publicly available in the early stages of investigating a Lemon Law claim.

A single TSB may not give enough information to know whether a particular vehicle is a lemon or not; but information contained in service bulletins may provide useful for experts inspecting a vehicle; likewise, it may clarify, confirm or call into question a service manager?s claim as to whether a particular condition is known to exist.

You can find TSB's on the website of the Office of Defects Investigation division of NHTSA . Have your car or truck's year, make and model information handy. It is sometimes useful to have the actual VIN (vehicle idenitifcation number) as well. The NHTSA website also provides recall and other useful consumer information.

Full post as published by Lemon Law Blog on April 12, 2007 (boomark / email).