Some cars come back. Occasionally that is the car; often it is something you did last time. Vehicles, then Lemon Watch, puts the pattern in front of you before the customer finds it.
The page itself is free.
The threshold
A vehicle appears when, in the last 90 days, it has:
- three or more active manufacturer warranty claims, or
- two or more active insurance repairs
Those are deliberately low bars. A car with three live warranty claims in a quarter is worth ten minutes of somebody's attention, whatever the explanation turns out to be.
Where you see it
- The Lemon Watch page, which scans your whole book. This is the Monday morning review across every repeat customer at once.
- A banner on the individual vehicle record, so whoever opens that car sees it without going looking.
- The Today briefing on the workshop dashboard.
- A daily digest email to the workshop.
What it depends on
Lemon watch reads the warranty claims and insurance repairs tables. Both of those are paid add-ons: Warranty Claim Tracker at 29 dollars a month and Insurance Repair Portal at 39 dollars a month. If you run neither, the page is free, open and permanently empty, because there is nothing for it to read.
It does not currently look at ordinary customer-paid jobs, so a car coming back three times on your own dime will not raise a flag here.
What to do with a flagged car
- Read the claim narratives back to back. Repeat claims on the same system usually name the cause themselves.
- Where the pattern is a manufacturer problem, the per-manufacturer scorecard is the evidence for an escalation call. See track manufacturer warranty claims.
- Where the pattern is repeat insurance work on the same panel, look at the earlier repair before the insurer does. See track insurance repair claims.
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