DENVER — Your car is one of the biggest buys you'll make in your lifetime, but Colorado's protections when you buy a defective one, or a lemon, are notoriously some of the weakest in the country.
But an update to the state law adds some new protections for car buyers starting Wednesday.
"What's news about this law is that Colorado is moving into the 21st Century, updating our lemon laws. We, frankly, had laws that were outdated and were weaker than most of the states," said Phil Weiser, Colorado's Attorney General, in a news conference Tuesday.
Brent Wood with the Colorado Auto Dealers Association said the law will protect both consumers and good dealerships and send a message to any bad actors.
"It's long overdue, and it's going to have a tremendous impact for our consumers here in Colorado," said Wood. "This bill takes out a lot of the delays in the repairs, which the consumer oftentimes can't afford to be down for that long, and the confusion as to whether it was a lemon or not."
The updated SB 24-192 gives consumers new rights, including more time to file a claim and a longer protection period.
Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, a Democrat who represents Adams and Arapahoe counties, co-sponsored the legislation after she said she experienced first-hand the issues of buying a defective car.
"It was an issue that I cared about because we were trying to help my son buy a used car," said Michaelson Jenet. "And they didn't give us the opportunity to go and have the car checked out by a third party who would have been able to tell us not to buy the car."
Under the updated law, dealerships selling vehicles classified as "Lemon Law Buyback" must allow a third-party inspection and a 7-day "free look period" for returning.
Matt Osborne, director of consumer law at Ramos Law, said Colorado's lemon law still falls short because it's one of the few in the country that required consumers to pay attorneys fees if they lose in court.
"We don't really use Colorado's lemon law, because it's the only lemon law in the country that I'm aware of that has a rule that says if the consumer loses their case, they have to pay the manufacturer's attorney's fees," said Osborne. "And so it's not worth the risk, in my opinion, because let's say you have a $30,000 car, and if you lose your case, then you're going to get get hundreds of thousand of dollars in attorney's fees for the manufacturer and the big firms that represent them. So it's just not worth the risk. So that's why we usually use the federal statute."
He said under the federal lemon law, the court may order the manufacturer to pay attorney's fees, and it doesn't have the cumbersome dispute resolution process involved in Colorado's law.
However, the federal law presents challenges for Coloradans because a resolution in court takes significantly longer to bring to court than a state case.
Denver7 Investigates has also been shining a light on Colorado's weak protections for used cars because of the "public impact" clause in the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.
Colorado is one of only three states that require consumers prove "public harm," which is not clearly defined in the law, according to Osborne.
Sen. Michaelson Jenet said she was in favor of a bill that would change that last session, but it was not successful.
"I think that there's plenty of room for improvement [in Colorado's consumer protection laws]. I'm really grateful for the steps that we have taken to strengthen it, because we had such a weak law, but there's more opportunity that we can strengthen the law," said Michaelson Jenet.
