Why California’s Consumer Protection Laws Are Different — And What They Might Have Meant for a Utah Man Who Drove His Car Through a Dealership
Why California’s Consumer Protection Laws Are Different — And What They Might Have Meant for a Utah Man Who Drove His Car Through a Dealership
For most people, a car is the second-largest purchase they will ever make, right behind a home. The Federal Reserve has observed that, outside of a house, an automobile is typically one of the largest financial assets an individual owns, and auto loans are the third-largest category of household debt in the United States, trailing only mortgage and student loan debt. Just like a home, though, a car isn’t optional for most working people — it’s how they get to work, get their kids to school, and keep their lives running. When something goes wrong with that purchase, the consequences aren’t abstract; they hit a household’s ability to function.
And cars have gotten dramatically more expensive. The average new car in the U.S. now costs roughly $48,000–$49,000, and the average monthly payment on a new vehicle hit a record high of about $770–$777 in the first half of 2026 — up from an average of $491 a month just a decade earlier, in 2015. Nearly one in five new-car buyers is now paying over $1,000 a month for their vehicle, and total U.S. auto loan debt has climbed past $1.6 trillion. A car isn’t just a purchase anymore; for many households it is one of the largest recurring line items in the monthly budget, competing directly with rent or a mortgage payment.
So what happens when a consumer discovers, hours or days after signing, that the car they just bought is defective — and the dealer says “too bad, you bought it as-is”?
The video that made this question national news
In December 2024, a Utah man named Michael Lee Murray purchased a used Subaru Outback from Tim Dahle Mazda Southtowne in Sandy, Utah. According to police reports and multiple news outlets, Murray discovered mechanical issues with the vehicle within hours of the sale and returned to the dealership demanding a refund. The dealership told him the car was sold “as is” and refused. According to the Sandy City Police Department, Murray had warned staff that he would drive the car through the front doors if he wasn’t given his money back — and that afternoon, he did exactly that, driving the vehicle through the dealership’s plate-glass storefront, through the front desk, and into the showroom. No one was seriously injured, but the dealership sustained an estimated $10,000 in damage, and Murray was arrested and charged with felony criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, and economic interruption.
Video of the incident, captured on the dealership’s own security cameras, went viral across social media, including a reel posted to Instagram by news station KUTV (@kutv2news). (Note to readers: the KUTV reel and the news coverage cited below are independently verifiable.)
Following the incident, a spokesperson for Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection publicly confirmed something important: Utah has no three-day right to cancel or rescind an automobile purchase. Once you sign, absent a specific written return policy from the dealer, the car is generally yours — mechanical problems and all — unless you can prove the dealer violated a specific warranty or engaged in fraud, and then pursue a claim through the courts, on your own dime, to prove it.
Nobody condones what Mr. Murray did — driving a car into a building is a crime, and a serious one. But the underlying frustration — being told you have no recourse against a car you were sold hours earlier — is a story we hear constantly from consumers, in different and far less destructive forms. What’s worth examining is why that frustration curdles into a sense of total powerlessness for a Utah consumer in a way that it generally does not for a California consumer with the same complaint.
What California law does differently
California has two statutes that, together, are widely regarded as among the strongest consumer-protection tools in the country: the Consumers Legal Remedies Act (CLRA) and the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act.
The Consumers Legal Remedies Act (Civil Code §§ 1750–1784)
The CLRA prohibits a specific list of deceptive and unfair sales practices — including misrepresenting the characteristics or quality of goods, representing that used or reconditioned goods are new, and inserting unconscionable terms into a sales contract. If a dealer sells a car “as is” while knowing about and concealing a specific defect, or misrepresents the car’s condition to close the sale, that conduct can potentially fall within the CLRA’s reach.
The reason California consumer attorneys are willing to take CLRA cases for consumers who could never afford to pay by the hour is Civil Code § 1780(e): “The court shall award court costs and attorney’s fees to a prevailing plaintiff.” That’s not discretionary — the statute uses “shall.” A defendant can only recover its own fees if the court finds the consumer’s suit was brought in bad faith. This is a one-way, mandatory fee-shift: the risk runs almost entirely toward the business, not the consumer.
The Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act (Civil Code §§ 1790–1795.8)
Song-Beverly — commonly known as California’s “Lemon Law” — is older still, enacted in 1970. It predates the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act by five years and, at the time, was described as the most ambitious state consumer-warranty statute in the country. It requires manufacturers to repair, replace, or repurchase vehicles that can’t be fixed within a reasonable number of attempts while under warranty, and its 1982 expansion, the Tanner Consumer Protection Act (Civil Code § 1793.22), created a presumption that a vehicle is a “lemon” if it needs four or more repairs for the same defect, or is out of service for 30 or more cumulative days, within the first 18 months or 18,000 miles.
Two provisions make Song-Beverly unusually powerful for consumers:
• Civil Code § 1794(d) requires the court to award the prevailing buyer “a sum equal to the aggregate amount of costs and expenses, including attorney’s fees based on actual time expended, determined by the court to have been reasonably incurred.” Like the CLRA, this is mandatory and one-way — the manufacturer pays the consumer’s attorney if the consumer wins; the consumer generally does not pay the manufacturer’s attorney if the consumer loses.
• Civil Code § 1794(c) allows a civil penalty of up to two times actual damages where the manufacturer’s violation is found to be willful — on top of the buyback itself.
It’s worth being precise here rather than overselling it: California courts narrowed Song-Beverly’s reach for used vehicles sold without a continuing manufacturer’s warranty in Rodriguez v. FCA US LLC (2024). So Song-Beverly is not a blank check for every used, as-is sale — but the CLRA’s deception-based protections, and Song-Beverly’s protections for vehicles still under a manufacturer’s warranty, remain squarely in play, and neither depends on the consumer being able to front legal fees.
Why the fee-shift is the whole ballgame
Put simply: without one-way, mandatory fee-shifting, most consumer auto claims are not economically rational to litigate. A defective $25,000–$50,000 car purchase is a serious loss to a household, but it’s rarely large enough to justify tens of thousands of dollars in hourly attorney fees under the default “American Rule,” where each side pays its own lawyer regardless of outcome. Manufacturers and dealers know this, and it shapes how hard they fight even meritorious claims. California’s fee-shift flips that math: it lets a consumer with a legitimate claim retain a qualified attorney on a contingency basis, because the statute — not the client — pays the lawyer if the case succeeds. That structural feature is precisely what allowed California’s lemon law bar to become a genuine, functioning enforcement mechanism rather than a right that exists only on paper.
Utah’s comparable laws — and where they diverge
To be fair to Utah, it is not a state without consumer protection. It has a Consumer Sales Practices Act (Utah Code § 13-11-1 et seq.) and a New Motor Vehicle Warranties Act, commonly called Utah’s Lemon Law (Utah Code § 13-20-1 et seq.). But both differ from their California counterparts in ways that matter enormously to an ordinary consumer trying to hire a lawyer.
• Utah’s Consumer Sales Practices Act (§ 13-11-19) allows a consumer harmed by a deceptive or unconscionable act to recover “actual damages plus court costs.” It does not provide for mandatory attorney’s fees to a prevailing consumer the way California’s CLRA does.
• Utah’s Lemon Law (§ 13-20-7) provides that “the court may award attorneys’ fees to the prevailing party.” Two things stand out compared to California: it says may, not shall (discretionary, not mandatory), and it says prevailing party rather than prevailing buyer — meaning, unlike California’s one-way shift, the fee risk can in principle cut against the consumer as well.
• Utah’s Lemon Law also expressly disclaims creating a cause of action against the dealer — it largely reaches manufacturers, not the dealership that sold the car — and, per Utah’s own consumer protection statute guide, does not cover used vehicles sold without a qualifying new-vehicle warranty in the same way California’s regime can reach warranted vehicles.
• And as Utah’s own Division of Consumer Protection confirmed publicly after the Sandy incident, Utah has no statutory three-day right to cancel a car purchase.
The practical result: a Utah consumer with a plausible claim faces a real, and in some cases mutual, risk of paying attorney’s fees out of pocket (or exposure to the other side’s fees) to pursue a remedy that, in California, would very likely place none of that financial risk regarding attorney fees on the consumer at all.
California even lets a buyer purchase the right to change their mind
The Sandy, Utah incident began with a very specific gap in the law: Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection confirmed there is no right — none, at any price — to cancel a car purchase once it’s signed. California addresses that exact gap directly, through a mechanism Utah simply doesn’t have: the contract cancellation option agreement, codified at Vehicle Code § 11713.21.
Under § 11713.21, a dealer selling a used vehicle priced under $40,000 to an individual buyer must offer the buyer the option to purchase a right to cancel the deal “without cause” — no defect, no misrepresentation, no reason required at all. If the buyer accepts the option, the price is capped by statute on a sliding scale tied to the vehicle’s cash price — for example, no more than $75 for a vehicle priced at $5,000 or less, up to a maximum of one percent of the purchase price for vehicles between $30,000 and $40,000 — and it guarantees the buyer at least until the close of business on the second day after delivery to return the car for a full refund (minus the small option fee and any statutorily capped restocking fee).
In other words, California doesn’t just punish dealers after the fact for selling a defective car — it gives the buyer, for a modest and price-capped fee, the ability to simply walk away from any used-car deal for two full days, no questions asked, no lawsuit required. That is precisely the tool that did not exist for the Utah dealership’s customer, and its absence from Utah law is not an oversight worth glossing over — it’s a structural difference in how the two states allocate the risk of a bad car purchase.
Why “unwind the deal” isn’t a strong enough deterrent on its own
It’s worth pausing on why California layered punitive damages onto the CLRA and a civil penalty onto Song-Beverly, rather than simply making the consumer’s remedy a refund or a buyback.
If rescission — unwinding the sale and giving the money back — were the only consequence a dealer or manufacturer ever faced for violating these laws, the economics would tilt heavily in the wrongdoer’s favor. A refund puts the consumer back where they started, but it doesn’t cost the business anything beyond what it would have owed the honest, deal-respecting customer in the first place — and it does nothing to account for the fact that not every wronged consumer sues. Litigation is expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally draining; plenty of people who are legally entitled to relief never pursue it, whether because they don’t know their rights, can’t afford the disruption, or simply give up. If a dealer or manufacturer’s only downside for cutting corners is refunding the handful of customers who go to the trouble of suing and winning, a bad actor could, in principle, profit from a pattern of misconduct across many transactions — as long as it is only caught and forced to make good in a fraction of them. A business facing pure rescission as its worst-case outcome has little financial reason to change its behavior toward the customers who never complain.
That is the gap punitive damages and civil penalties are designed to close. The CLRA authorizes punitive damages under Civil Code § 1780(a)(4) where a business’s conduct involved oppression, fraud, or malice — remedies that are, by design, not calibrated to what the consumer lost, but to what it takes to make continuing the conduct not worth it. Song-Beverly’s civil penalty under § 1794(c) works the same way: up to double the actual damages, on top of the buyback itself, when the manufacturer’s violation was willful. Both provisions exist for the same reason — to make sure that even a business that is only caught and sued a fraction of the time it cuts corners still comes out behind, not ahead, for having done so. Rescission alone answers “what does this one consumer get back.” Punitive damages and civil penalties answer the harder, and arguably more important, question: “what makes it not worth doing again.”
The broader state landscape
Every U.S. state has some version of an “unfair and deceptive acts and practices” statute — often called a “Little FTC Act” — modeled loosely on the Federal Trade Commission Act. But they vary enormously: some allow a private right of action for individual consumers and some don’t; some provide for mandatory attorney’s fees and multiple damages (Massachusetts’s UDAP statute, for example, allows a prevailing consumer to recover attorney’s fees and, on a showing of willful or knowing conduct, a mandatory doubling or trebling of actual damages) ; others, like Utah’s, cap the consumer’s recovery at actual damages plus court costs, with no guaranteed fee award.
I want to be straightforward about the limits of this post: a rigorous, citation-backed survey of fee-shifting rules under every state’s consumer-protection and lemon-law statutes is beyond the scope of a blog post, and I’m not going to hand you an uncited 50-state chart I can’t stand behind. What we can say, based on the statutory text above, is this: California’s combination of (1) a mandatory, one-way fee-shift under a broad consumer-fraud statute (the CLRA), (2) a second, independent mandatory one-way fee-shift specific to vehicle warranties (Song-Beverly), and (3) a built-in civil penalty of up to double damages for willful violations, is an unusually strong combination, and it is one of the reasons Song-Beverly is frequently cited by practitioners as a model that influenced lemon laws adopted in other states after 1970. Whether your state’s law matches California’s protections is a question for an attorney licensed in that state — for Utah specifically, that means a Utah-licensed consumer attorney, not this office.
The bottom line
Nobody should have to drive a car through a dealership to get anyone’s attention. The tragedy of the Sandy, Utah incident isn’t just the property damage or the criminal charges Mr. Murray now faces — it’s that the underlying consumer complaint, “I was sold a defective car and no one will give me my money back,” is exactly the kind of dispute California’s Legislature built a functioning, no-out-of-pocket-cost legal pathway to resolve, back in 1970. California consumers who buy a defective vehicle, or who are deceived in the sales process, don’t have to choose between silently absorbing the loss and a felony. They can call a lawyer.
If you bought a vehicle in California and believe it was misrepresented, sold with undisclosed defects, or hasn’t been properly repaired under warranty, John W. Hanson of Hanson Law Firm in La Jolla encourages you to have your situation evaluated: www.thesandiegolemonlawyer.com or contact@thesandiegolemonlawyer.com. This post is general information, not a legal opinion about your specific facts, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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This is attorney advertising. John W. Hanson, State Bar No. 214771, Hanson Law Firm, 7752 Fay Ave., Ste. F, La Jolla, CA 92037-4328 | www.thesandiegolemonlawyer.com | contact@thesandiegolemonlawyer.com. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Hanson Law Firm is licensed to practice law only in California and offers no opinion on the law of Utah or any other jurisdiction. If you are not a California resident with a California-law question, please consult an attorney licensed in your state.
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