The thought of having to spend big money to repair your vehicle, not to mention the hassle of being without a car while those repairs are made, is something no car owner wants to deal with. Fortunately, there are ways owners and buyers can mitigate that risk.

For starters, you can try to pick a car known for reliability and low repair costs. You can also, of course, buy a brand-new, nearly-new, or certified used vehicle with a factory warranty. Having a warranty won’t prevent your vehicle from needing repairs, but it will make those repairs much cheaper and easier to deal with.

But what if a vehicle’s issues go beyond simple repairs or warranty work? Perhaps the problems are so frequent or so severe that they render the car functionally unusable or even dangerous to operate — to say nothing of its greatly diminished value. This is where lemon laws come in. Lemon laws are designed to protect car buyers in the event of vehicle problems that go beyond the norm. However, not every problematic car is a lemon, as the tale of one North Carolina car owner (via WFMY News) exemplifies. There, as in many other states, a car must be new and suffer recurring — and replicable — defects before it qualifies as a lemon.

The woman’s lemon law fight was covered by North Carolina’s WFMY News, which also assisted her through its consumer protection campaign — and it’s not the first time a local news station has helped the owner with a problematic car seek compensation. In the North Carolina case, the news story does not specify which make or model of car she bought, but it does highlight the situation that lemon laws were made for. It also shines a spotlight on the specific criteria involved with using lemon laws in that state.

For starters, to qualify for NC’s lemon law, the vehicle in question must be less than 24 months old and have fewer than 24,000 miles on the odometer. While there are states that extend protection to older cars, most states’ lemon laws have similar requirements regarding vehicle age. So you can’t buy a five-year-old used car and expect the same protections you’d get with a new one.

Additionally, the vehicle must have been in the shop or dealer service department for the same issue at least four times. In this case, the woman’s car suffered a complete loss of power on multiple occasions: she sent it to the shop three times in 2024 and once more in summer 2025. The issue was so troublesome that the manufacturer eventually sent a specialist to try to fix it, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.

Even though the vehicle’s repeated problems qualified it for lemon law protection under state law, the process was held up when the service department said it couldn’t replicate the issue. WFMY News eventually stepped in and put the owner in touch with the North Carolina State Attorney’s Office. By the spring of 2026, the vehicle manufacturer agreed to buy back the vehicle under the lemon law.

In the end, the woman was compensated with a little over $52,000 from the manufacturer, which she used to buy a new vehicle — not surprisingly, a different model than the one that gave her so many issues. In this case, North Carolina’s lemon law protections helped her out tremendously. If you want to invoke the lemon law for your own troublesome car, though, you’ll want to make sure your vehicle is both new enough and has the kind of recurring issues that would meet your state’s criteria.

No matter where you live, if you’re car shopping and want extra peace of mind after your car stops being covered under the lemon law, an extended warranty could be a worthy investment. As with all major auto-related purchases, though, it’s crucial to research these warranties to verify their coverage and ensure they’re worth the cost.