Sunday, March 28, 2010

Class Act to Follow

I was reading in the news this week about a class action lawsuit shaping up against Toyota. The charge is that the company's failure to remedy safety concerns in their vehicles is negatively affecting the resale value of these vehicles. A similar lawsuit was filed against GM a few years back, I think, though I can't be sure and I don't know the outcome because my quick Google search on the topic of class action lawsuits concerning vehicle resale values was flooded by the more recent Toyota-related news.

Though it is most likely that we will drive our 10 month old Rav4 into the ground, resale value was one of the factors I considered when we bought our car last year. Still, I'm not sure how these class action lawsuits work. I mean, I get it in principle, but it seems like bulk of the payout goes to the lawyers. I don't know that adding my name to a lawsuit for a $50 cheque that will cost Totota $1000 to write fits in my model of justice.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Like most class action law suits, this seems kinda ridiculous to me.

While you can consider resale value based on past evidence, you really have no way of knowing what will come to pass... and really this is just making the situation worse as if the class action wins and the company is forced to pay out a google dollars, that is going to be a further drag on the company and not going to help them get back to producing quality cars.

Or perhaps you just get a coupon to use towards your next Toyota vehicle.

But you are right, the lawyers would get very rich.