We Counted Every Lawsuit Against Automakers in LA County. Here's Who Gets Sued the Most.

The Superior Court of Los Angeles County is the busiest lemon-law venue in America. The court knows exactly which car companies get sued, and how often — but it has never ranked them, and neither has anyone else since a consumer group last tried in 2022. So we did it ourselves: we pulled every civil case filed against an automaker's U.S. sales entity in 2025, across every LASC courthouse, deduplicated the case numbers, and divided each brand's total by how many cars it actually registered in California. The full sortable table, methodology, and a free-to-cite dataset live on our Most-Sued Automakers ranking page. Here is what the numbers say.

The headline numbers

• 15,114 lawsuits were filed against 24 automaker groups in LA County in 2025 — overwhelmingly Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act (lemon law) and breach-of-warranty claims.
• Stellantis — the parent of Jeep, Ram, Chrysler and Dodge — is the most-sued automaker per car sold: 37.6 suits per 1,000 California registrations, one lawsuit for roughly every 27 cars it registered in the state.
• Jaguar Land Rover is second at 30.6 per 1,000 — striking for a brand with barely 15,000 California sales.
• General Motors drew the most suits in raw numbers: 3,356 in a single county, in a single year.
• At the clean end of the table: Subaru (1.1), Genesis (1.2), Toyota/Lexus (1.3), and Mazda (1.6) — and Tesla, at 3.1, is sued at less than a tenth of Stellantis's rate.

Why 'per car sold' is the honest way to rank

Raw lawsuit counts reward small brands and punish big ones. Toyota sold more than 387,000 vehicles in California in 2025 and drew 513 suits; Porsche sold about 17,000 and drew 250. Divide by sales and the picture inverts: Porsche's rate (14.7 per 1,000) is eleven times Toyota's. The per-1,000-registrations rate is the closest thing that exists to a public accountability score — not what a brand's marketing says, but how often its own customers ended up at the courthouse.

What a lawsuit against an automaker usually means

When an owner sues Jeep's parent company or General Motors directly — rather than a dealer — it is almost always a Song-Beverly claim: the car had a substantial warranty defect, repeated repair attempts failed, and the manufacturer would not buy the vehicle back until a lawsuit forced the issue. California law is blunt about the remedy: a qualifying lemon gets repurchased, with the finance balance paid off and most of what the owner paid returned, plus the manufacturer pays the owner's attorney's fees. That fee-shifting provision is why these cases get filed by the thousands — owners don't pay out of pocket to enforce their rights.

The brands to watch

Beyond the big names, the table has a second story: newer and low-volume brands with outsized rates. Polestar debuts at 15.8 suits per 1,000 California sales — worse than Porsche. Maserati (32 suits) and VinFast (23 suits) sell so few cars that CNCDA doesn't even report their registrations separately, which makes those counts extraordinary. If you own a Jeep, Ram, Land Rover, or any brand near the top of the ranking and your car keeps going back to the dealer, the data says you are far from alone.

Where the data comes from

Lawsuit counts come from the LA Superior Court's public civil case index, searched entity by entity (26 manufacturer sales entities), with captive-finance suits, dealer-only suits, and unrelated matches excluded. Registration figures are CNCDA's California Auto Outlook for full-year 2025, compiled by Experian Automotive. The complete methodology, all caveats, and the CC BY-licensed dataset are on the ranking page — free for reporters and researchers to cite with attribution.