Appeals court gives Nissan classaction suit new life

A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a proposed statewide classaction lawsuit accusing Nissan Motors of installing defective hydraulic clutch systems, which can cause a clutch pedal to stick to the floor, on some Nissan and Infiniti models dating to 2007.

The suit was filed by Huu Nguyen of San Jose, who said he had to spend more than $700 to replace the clutch system on the new 2012 Nissan 370Z that he bought for his son as a college graduation present. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Jose said the suit could not qualify as a class action because the owners’ claims for damages would vary widely, depending on how their individual clutch systems performed and how long they drove their cars before any problems arose.

But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the suit was based on a claim shared by all owners of the vehicles: that Nissan had “knowingly designed a defective clutch system and did not inform consumers of the defect.”

Nguyen “does not seek damages for the faulty performance of the clutch system,” but instead alleges that “Nissan’s manufacture and concealment of a defective clutch system injured (buyers) at the time of sale,” Judge Milan Smith said in the 30 ruling. The court returned the case to Koh for a final decision on classaction status and further proceedings.

Ryan Wu, a lawyer for Nguyen, said he hopes that “the thousands of California consumers” who bought the vehicles “will be able to vindicate their rights and receive compensation.” He said the ruling should also help consumers in other cases by allowing collective lawsuits over a common defect despite variations in damage claims.

Lawyers for Nissan could not be reached for comment.

The models targeted by the lawsuit are the Nissan 350Z from 2007 through 2009; the Nissan 370Z from 2009 through 2015; the Infiniti G35 in 2007 and 2008; the Infiniti 637 from 2008 through 2014, and all years of the Infiniti Q60, first sold in 2014.

Nguyen said his son was driving his Nissan 370Z on the freeway in March 2014 when the clutch pedal lost pressure and would not return to its low position, forcing him to pull off the road and slow down until he was finally able to shift into second gear. The dealer replaced the clutch system without charge because the car was still under warranty, the suit said, but the same thing happened again two years later and Nguyen had to buy a new clutch system.

The suit said Nissan, when it redesigned the vehicles’ clutch system in 2007, replaced a previous aluminum structure with an aluminumplastic alloy that could not properly absorb heat and caused the system to overload. Nguyen’s lawyers quoted Nissan internal records in 2007 about an “abnormal hightemperature” and a company engineer who wrote in 2012 that “frequent claims of clutch pedal sticking to floor” had created a “breakdown item.”

The company issued a service bulletin in 2013 instructing dealers to replace the clutch systems, but has never notified consumers, the suit said. Wu said he has heard many reports of other stalls and breakdowns, but none that caused major injuries.

In her April 2018 ruling that allowed Nguyen to sue only for himself, Koh said the value of the cars and their clutch systems would depend on their use by individual owners — Nguyen’s son, for example, drove his car more than 26,000 miles before the first failure. But the appeals court said a class action can be based on a common defect that exists when an item is purchased, no matter how long it is used.

Under California law that applies to the case, Smith said, quoting an earlier ruling of the appeals court, “the focus is on the difference between what was paid and what a reasonable consumer would have paid at the time of purchase” if the defects had been disclosed.