Nissan Opposes Class Cert. in Defective Clutch Class Action Lawsuit

Nissan is seeking to block an effort to bring claims over an allegedly defective clutch mechanism as a class action lawsuit.

The company filed a motion in federal court Monday, opposing an effort by plaintiff Huu Nguyen to certify a Class of persons who owned or leased certain Nissan and Infiniti vehicles built with a manual transmission.

According to Nguyen’s Nissan class action lawsuit, the defect causes the clutch to lose pressure and stick to the floor of the vehicle.

Nguyen says the defect is attributable to the materials used to make the clutch’s concentric slave cylinder, materials he says do not conduct heat as well as other materials that could have been used.

The clutches at issue were installed in manual-transmission Nissan 350Z and 370Z vehicles, as well as in Nissan-made Infiniti G35, G37 and Q60 vehicles.

Nguyen moved for class certification in December 2017, seeking to certify a Class of California original owners and lessees of affected Nissan-built vehicles made with manual transmissions.

In countering Nguyen’s motion for class certification, Nissan argues that individual issues predominate over any issues shared by the entire proposed Class, making it inappropriate to litigate this case as a class action.

In particular, the company claims, Nguyen’s claim for breach of implied warranty is wholly dependent on individual issues, since it depends on a case-by-case evaluation of how each subject vehicle performed.

On similar grounds, Nissan is attacking Nguyen’s proposal to create a subclass of California consumers who did not receive due notice of the alleged defect under California law.

The company says Nguyen fails to show that all the vehicles at issue suffer from the same defect. Neither does he show that all proposed Class Members received the same product, or that the probability of clutch trouble is the same for all the vehicles at issue.

Similarly, Nguyen has not shown that each current or former owner or lessee of an affected vehicle has suffered the same harm, which according to Nissan creates fatal flaws in his theory of damages. The company claims his proposal to measure damages by the average cost of repair has no legal support or empirical justification.

Nguyen filed this Nissan clutch class action lawsuit in September 2016. He alleges the clutch on his Nissan 370Z suddenly began to lose pressure and stick to the floorboard. The car had only 30,000 miles on it at the time, he claims.

After a Nissan dealership replaced the clutch, Nguyen reports the same problem happened with the new clutch. At that point, the vehicle had 50,000 miles on it and was out of warranty. Nguyen says he paid $700 out-of-pocket for a third-party shop to replace the clutch.

The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Jordan L. Lurie, Robert K. Friedl, Tarek H. Zohdy, Cody R. Padgett and Karen L Wallace of Capstone Law APC.

The Nissan Clutch Assembly Defect Class Action Lawsuit is Nguyen v. Nissan North America Inc., Case No. 5:16-cv-05591, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.