Automotive News reports how a dealer in Missouri has taken the rare step, for any dealer anywhere, of suing a customer. It's not the best way to win friends and influence people - well, certainly not a good way to win friends. Even in the litigation-prone United States. But what else could the dealer do, faced with a YouTube video claiming to show that the customer had been overcharged for a repair?
Although the clip is only 17 minutes long, so it isn't in real time, and not all of it is workshop footage, the timings are shown on it. (You can find it here: I would embed it, but that facility is disabled.) The dispute is what happened before what the camera shows - like, I suppose, all dashboard cameras, and (as the world knows) black-box cockpit voice recorders, it constantly records over itself. The dealer says that there was a lot of diagnostic time the day before, and if (as the stories on AN and here in the St Louis Post-Dispatch say) the problem was a fuse that wasn't in the car when it was made you can imagine why a considerable amount of time might have been lost looking for the problem. A consequence of the replacement by electronics of the mechanic's instinct, perhaps.
While a dealer suing a customer, and evidently a long-standing one at that, is newsworthy, the big legal issue here is less interesting for non-US readers. The dealer obtained an injunction - a temporary restraining order requiring the video to be removed from YouTube. Then a few days later the judge changed her mind. As one of the lawyers acting for the customer, Paul Alan Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, wrote on the Consumer Law and Policy blog, the point is that TROs should never be granted in defamation cases, not in Missouri or many other states (and I think would be highly unusual in the defamation action capital of the world, London). It's a constitutional, freedom-of-speech, matter. That's why the judge dissolved the order, leaving the facts to be argued about another day. When that happens, it will be of much more direct interest to the industry, given the ease with which consumers are now able to monitor the work carried out on their cars and make public the results of that monitoring.
But if this shows a threat that dealers are going to have to learn to live with, YouTube also provides a channel for the dealer to respond. I could embed the video here but I imagine they want viewings to be recorded, and viewings are currently 4,300 against 90,000 in favour of the customer (you must watch them both!) so here is a link. That's also fairer.
Although the clip is only 17 minutes long, so it isn't in real time, and not all of it is workshop footage, the timings are shown on it. (You can find it here: I would embed it, but that facility is disabled.) The dispute is what happened before what the camera shows - like, I suppose, all dashboard cameras, and (as the world knows) black-box cockpit voice recorders, it constantly records over itself. The dealer says that there was a lot of diagnostic time the day before, and if (as the stories on AN and here in the St Louis Post-Dispatch say) the problem was a fuse that wasn't in the car when it was made you can imagine why a considerable amount of time might have been lost looking for the problem. A consequence of the replacement by electronics of the mechanic's instinct, perhaps.
While a dealer suing a customer, and evidently a long-standing one at that, is newsworthy, the big legal issue here is less interesting for non-US readers. The dealer obtained an injunction - a temporary restraining order requiring the video to be removed from YouTube. Then a few days later the judge changed her mind. As one of the lawyers acting for the customer, Paul Alan Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, wrote on the Consumer Law and Policy blog, the point is that TROs should never be granted in defamation cases, not in Missouri or many other states (and I think would be highly unusual in the defamation action capital of the world, London). It's a constitutional, freedom-of-speech, matter. That's why the judge dissolved the order, leaving the facts to be argued about another day. When that happens, it will be of much more direct interest to the industry, given the ease with which consumers are now able to monitor the work carried out on their cars and make public the results of that monitoring.
But if this shows a threat that dealers are going to have to learn to live with, YouTube also provides a channel for the dealer to respond. I could embed the video here but I imagine they want viewings to be recorded, and viewings are currently 4,300 against 90,000 in favour of the customer (you must watch them both!) so here is a link. That's also fairer.
No comments:
Post a Comment