Lemon (automobile)

A lemon is a vehicle (often new) that is found to have several manufacturing defects which may affect the safety, value or use of the vehicle. Any vehicle with numerous, severe issues can be termed so and, by extension, so can any product with flaws too great or severe to serve its purpose.

The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act is a United States federal law enacted in 1975 to protect consumers from deceptive warranty practices. The Act was sponsored by Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington with co-sponsors Senator Frank Moss of Utah, and U.S. Representative John E. Moss of California. The purpose of the Act was to make product warranties more easily understood and enforceable, and to provide the Federal Trade Commission with a means of better protecting consumers. The Act does not force a manufacturer to include a warranty with its products but if there is one it must be in writing and comply with the rules of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

The word's use to describe a highly flawed item predates its use in describing cars and can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century as a British and American slang.

Its first attribution to mean a problematic car was in a Volkswagen advertisement created by Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone as part of an advertisement campaign managed by William Bernbach, all advertising executives with the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1960, which was a follow-up to their Think Small advertising campaign for VW.

Economist George Akerlof in his 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" identified the severe lemon problems that may afflict markets characterized by asymmetrical information.

New vehicles may contain flaws or defects in workmanship, caused by design flaws or by an error during the automotive factory build process. These errors can range from parts being installed incorrectly to a tool that was used to build the car not being removed or a batch of materials with structural or chemical flaws. The idioms "Friday afternoon car" or "Monday morning car", were used to describe new cars that had been delivered with numerous faults or suffered from an excessive number of warranty claims early in their lives – based on the premise that assembly line workers were far more likely to make errors at the times when they were perceived to be least interested in the standard of their workmanship.

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