THE Consumers’ Association of Penang (CAP) lauds the recent announcement by the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry that it is looking into efforts to improve laws related to the sale and purchase of used vehicles.
However, we urge the ministry to extend the lemon law to new cars as well as they can be lemons too.
The lemon law is a remedy for purchasers of consumer products, particularly motorised vehicles, that repeatedly fail to meet the standards of quality and performance. The lemon law strengthens the Consumer Protection Act (CPA). It should be introduced to provide consumers holding onto “lemons” (nice to see but sour and tart to taste) an avenue of legal redress.
This law requires defective cars to be repaired or replaced. A consumer may request a reduction in price or get a refund. Currently, countries such as the United States, Singapore, South Korea, China, and the Philippines have implemented the lemon law.
The lemon law is incorporated into Singapore’s Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act 2004. We can also do so with our CPA.
It considers:
- The nature of the problem
- The number of days the vehicle is unavailable to the consumer for the repair of the same mechanical issue
- The number of repair attempts made
If the repairs cannot be completed within the number of days stated in the act, the manufacturer is obligated to buy the defective vehicle back.
The lemon law covers second-hand cars as well, introducing a Standard Vehicle Assessment Report checklist. This checklist of items ranged from visual, equipment, and road test checks concurrently by both the dealer and the buyer to ensure transparency.
It also covers a wide range of defects from aesthetics to mechanical-related issues.
In most cases, the various defects found in new cars leave car owners with little option except to go for car repairs at authorised car workshops. Owners of lemons costing more than RM50,000 cannot file their claim for exchange or refund at the Tribunal for Consumer Claims Malaysia. They have no options but to take the car company to court, incurring an expensive and time-consuming legal process. As it is now, vehicle owners may encounter:
- Workshops that conduct trial-and-error repairs, repairing one part to find the problem not solved and then proceeding with another repair. The service centre buys time until the warranty period expires and the car owner is then left to pay for subsequent repairs of the same defects
- Engineers’ falsely diagnosing and finding faults with vehicle owners (like over-running the service interval) to decline claims for major defects
- Cases of workshops holding vehicles for months, up to six months or more, and yet unable to provide diagnoses, let alone repair the vehicles
- Car service centres that refuse to admit that a defect cannot be fixed and thus do not need to refund or replace it with another car as required by the CPA
- A deprivation of the use of his car each time it is in the workshop. Therefore, it is pertinent to ascertain the number of times a new car undergoes repairs before the owner can file a case at the tribunal
- Uncertainty about how long the vehicle is going to remain in the service centre
Defective cars not only rip-off consumers, but are also unsafe on the roads and a danger to other road users.
With the lemon law in Singapore, a consumer can:
- Make a claim for a defective product (also known as lemons) purchased within six months
- Expect the seller of the defective product to repair, replace, refund or reduce the price of the defective product (subject to certain conditions)
- Get the defective product repaired within a reasonable time at the seller’s cost
- Ask for a price reduction while keeping the product or return the product for a refund if the seller fails to repair it
CAP calls on the government to introduce the lemon law for all vehicles regardless of price and would suggest that it is reasonable that a seriously defective car be repaired in a maximum of a month, and three attempts are reasonable for the service centre to repair the same defect before the lemon law applies.
We cannot understand why the lemon law is only proposed for old cars and why second-hand car buyers must purchase an extended warranty for their vehicle. Second-hand vehicles to be sold must first be inspected by Puspakom to ensure that it is in a reasonably good running condition.
We reiterate that the government should introduce the lemon law to ensure that car manufacturers and dealers are held responsible for their defective products and to repair the vehicle satisfactorily as required by the law. The law should also be applied to second-hand vehicles. The number of defective new vehicles Malaysians are hopelessly holding on to with no avenue for legal redress is worrying. Old cars costing less than RM50,000 can at least for now seek legal redress from TTPM. – The Vibes, September 23, 2022
Mohideen Abdul Kader is president of the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP)
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