FLORIDA CAR BUYERS BEWARE

By Earl Stewart

This front-page headline appeared in last week in USA Today. I’ll summarize the story for you: Car dealers and their associations are lobbying legislation into state laws to preserve their legal right to sell you a used car with a dangerous recall, like a defective Takata airbag. The law they’re advocating “sounds” like a good law until you think about it. The law is to require car dealers to “disclose” to the buyer that the car they’re buying has a dangerous recall. The word “disclose” when applied to car dealers becomes an oxymoron. Car dealers bury their “disclosures” in ultra-fine print, flashed on the TV screen, webpage, or PC monitor in a fraction of the time you can read it…that is, if you could even see it. Car dealers believe that, but getting these laws passed, they’ll dissuade federal and

state government from doing what they should have done years ago…MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO SELL A VEHICLE WITH A DANGEROUS SAFETY RECALL. By the way, there’s still no law in Florida requiring car dealers to disclose dangerous recalls.

Can anyone explain to me why it’s legal to sell you a vehicle with a dangerous recall? In fact, it’s even legal to sell you a vehicle with a dangerous recall that CANNOT BE REPAIRED. Thousands of used vehicles are sold every day with defective Takata airbags that cannot be fixed because the parts to fix them are unavailable.

I’ll answer my own question of why this is legal. Auto manufacturers and car dealers are afraid of the huge economic impact upon them if such a law were passed. The Florida Auto Dealers Association, FADA (and all other state dealers’ associations) the National Auto Dealers Association NADA, and Big Auto (VW, Toyota, GM, Ford, Honda, etc), combined, have ENORMOUS POLITICAL CLOUT. The auto manufacturer-auto dealer syndicate makes the NRA look “politically weak by comparison”.

So, what are Florida used car buyers to do? Contact Governor Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and your state senators and representatives. I tried for two years with Rick Scott and Pam Bondi to no avail. The more likely successful course of action is to check every used car you buy at www.SaferCar.gov, the website for the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. DO NOT BUY A USED CAR UNTIL YOU CHECK YOUR VIN AND VERIFIED IT HAS NO OUTSTANDING SAFETY RECALLS.