The car payment drafts on the 15th whether the car runs or not. A household can be making that payment while the vehicle sits in a service bay for the third time, paying for a rental out of pocket, and still covering insurance and registration on a car it cannot drive. The lender’s schedule does not pause for a backordered part.
That gap is the core of how George Mkrtchyan, Esq., Managing Attorney of Court House Lawyers in Glendale, California, frames a lemon law buyback. In his view, the real cost of a defective car is the money that keeps leaving an owner’s account while the car is out of service, and a buyback under California law is designed to return much of it. The risk, as he sees it, is that owners who never price the full buyback can accept a cash offer worth a fraction of what the claim could return.
The Lemon Law Costs That Keep Running While the Car Sits
Missing payments is rarely an option. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s guidance on what to do if you can’t make your car payments notes that in some cases lenders can repossess a vehicle without warning or a court order after a missed payment. So owners keep paying, often for months, on a car that keeps returning to the dealer.
Those payments are only part of the bill. The down payment is already spent. Sales tax and registration were paid at purchase. Finance charges accrue with every installment. Towing and rental cars add up on each failed repair. Owners rarely see these as one number, which is part of why a settlement offer can look reasonable when it is not.
Downtime carries its own cost, even when it never shows up on a statement. A commuter who loses a car for weeks at a time pays in rideshare fares, borrowed cars and rearranged schedules. Some of those expenses can be documented as incidental costs. Others simply land on the household, which is why a full record of the time out of service tends to strengthen any later discussion of value.
What a Lemon Law Buyback Can Return
When a manufacturer cannot repair a covered defect after a reasonable number of attempts, § 1793.2 generally provides for a replacement or a refund. A full buyback, as Court House Lawyers describes it for owners in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley, can return the down payment, monthly payments made, sales tax, finance charges, registration and incidental costs such as towing and rental cars.
A mileage offset generally comes off that total. It is calculated by multiplying the purchase price by the miles on the car at the first repair visit for the defect, divided by 120,000. The offset reflects the use the owner got from the car before the defect was first taken in for repair.
Fees are handled separately. Under § 1794, the manufacturer pays a prevailing consumer’s attorney’s fees, which means the firm’s fee does not come out of the buyback.
Cash-and-Keep Offers and the Buyback Number
Not every resolution is a buyback. Some manufacturers offer a cash-and-keep settlement: a payment to the owner, who keeps the car. These offers can be fair. They can also arrive early and low, before the owner has added up what a full buyback might return.
“Most owners see each payment, each interest bill and each rental receipt on its own,” Mkrtchyan says. “A buyback looks at them together, and that total is often the number an offer gets measured against.”
One of the firm’s Audi/Volkswagen claims followed that pattern. The manufacturer’s initial cash-and-keep offer was $3,000. After the firm presented the claim, the cash-and-keep settlement reached $15,000. The outcome reflected that vehicle’s history and warranty terms, and other claims can resolve very differently.
Pricing the Buyback Before Answering an Offer
The practical step Mkrtchyan recommends is simple arithmetic done early. Gather the purchase or finance contract, every payment record, the tax and registration figures, and receipts for towing or rentals. Then find the mileage on the first repair order for the defect. Those numbers give a rough picture of what a buyback could return, which in turn gives any cash offer a point of comparison. The estimate does not need to be exact to be useful. Even a rough total can show whether an offer sits near the buyback figure or far below it.
“A cash-and-keep offer can be the right answer for some owners,” Mkrtchyan acknowledges. “The trouble is that people often decide before they know both numbers. We would rather they see what a full buyback looks like also, even if they end up accepting a cash and keep settlement.”
Mkrtchyan, who was nominated for America’s Top 50 Lawyers in 2025 and 2026, handles California lemon law claims from the firm’s Glendale office for owners across Los Angeles County. His approach treats every offer as one figure to be checked against the full record, not as the final word on what the claim is worth.
The car payment will still draft on the 15th. What changes, once the buyback is priced, is that the owner knows what that payment has been building toward.
Past results do not guarantee or predict future outcomes. Every matter is evaluated on its own merits. This article is provided for general information and is not legal advice.
