Comment by lokar
15 hours ago
I (also in CA) lemon returned a Mercedes EV. Same kind of thing, they could not fix repeated software issues w/ the collision avoidance features.
I called them up, gave a short explanation, and they sent me to their vendor who handles the returns, no issues. Full price (including tax etc) back.
AIUI, they know not to fight, since in CA when they loose, they pay your legal fees.
I'm having a similar issue with Volvo. It occasionally sees a gate track on the ground as a 'hazard' and will hard-brake when slowly backing over it. It's inconsistent but happens regularly.
On the one hand, my 50 year old car (1976 BMW 2002) has very few safety measures, but on the other hand there’s no bullshit like this…
Back in the early 1980's, a high school friend from a semi-wealthy family received a money from his parents to buy his first car to drive to school. They were expecting him to buy a new Honda or Toyota, but he proudly showed up at home with an old used 2002. They were not happy, but we had a great time with that car. :-)
Your car also has a safety feature that the others upstream lack: a curb weight of only 2400 lbs. Which is already an order of magnitude more mass than necessary to move a few human beings around.
Also, by having some skin in the game, my guess is you're a lot more likely to drive it responsibly, which is probably the most effective safety feature of all.
I just got repeated run arounds from the euro brands - like they can’t reproduce it or that it was determined to be a non issue. The dealers would just eventually give me the phone number for the corporate line if I wanted to push more. But it wasn’t even some kind of support phone number - literally just a generic corporate number. So basically they were telling me to go away. Oh and top of that they charged me for diagnostic time.
That sucks. For me, it was clear the dealer did not really care, and was happy to call each visit a valid warranty repair attempt (and later agree it was not fixed).
Once it had been in N times, the game was over.