California Lemon Law Lawyer Blog

The NPR program Car Talk with Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, is the most popular car show on the radio. Ever wonder how you get through to talk about your car? It is not a matter of just calling 1-888-227-8255 and waiting to get connected to hosts according to a Wall Street Journal article in its February 18, 2009, edition.

About 10,000 people call in to Car Talk's answering machines every day. Some 1,000 callers manage to leave messages. Interns screen the messages and a producer makes follow-up calls to about 25 persons. The producer looks for a dozen articulate folks with a sense of humor and an interesting, current car problem that is straight forward enough to be discussed on the air. They also look for diverse "voices," (urban, rural, young, old, male, female) and an assortment of issues.

Contrary to some rumors, the brother do not have advance information on the callers or their car problems. The Car Talk website is www.cartalk.com.

Years ago, manufacturers and their dealers were forever telling owners with problem vehicles this "we've never seen this before" or "the car meets manufacturer's specifications" when the truth was that the manufacturer knew that the problem of which the owner was complaining was both real and to be found in other vehicles of the model. However, owners now communicate with each other about problems with their model vehicle using Internet forums. The upshot is that an owner with a problem vehicle may quickly discover that other owners are having the same problem.

In discovery in one of our class actions against a U.S. auto manufacturer, we obtained a copy of an internal memo that illustrates this development. The author made reference to an Internet forum on the particular truck model in question and then commented, "We can't lie to consumers anymore."

Some of the leading forums are automotiveforums.com, automotive.com, edmund.com/insideline, and rv.net. To find a forum specific to your model vehicle, just search using your model vehicle and the word forum. There seems to be a forum for every make and model vehicle.