Bitter Lemons
One supposed benefit of lemon laws is that they keep irrepairable cars out of the marketplace. Not so. In 1988 Chrysler was found to have resold 400 lemons in New York without notifying the buyers properly, and the next year an investigation in Pennsylvania uncovered 170 similar cases. Last year, 32 dealers in Northern California resold 51 GM vehicles that had been reassumed. In a California case that's still pending, Chrysler was also charged with selling 118 lemons.
'It's called lemon laundering,' says the CARS Foundation's Shahan. 'And it's fast becoming a big problem.'
– Smart Money, Wall Street Journal's Magazine, January, 1995