California's lemon law has a number most car owners have never heard of: two. When a manufacturer willfully fails to repurchase a defective vehicle, Civil Code section 1794(c) lets a jury award a civil penalty of up to two times the buyer's damages — on top of the refund itself.

In Valdovinos v. Kia Motors America, a Los Angeles County jury did exactly that. The owner's counsel: Knight Law Group (Roger Kirnos), with Gupta Wessler on the appeal.¹

What the jury awarded

Line item	Amount
Restitution (the refund)	$42,568.90
Incidental and consequential damages	$12,912.00
Civil penalty (willful refusal — 2× restitution)	$85,317.80
Total verdict	$127,976.70

The 2014 Kia Optima at the center of it was purchased new — 19 miles on the odometer, $30,127 with fees — and its reverse gear never worked right despite repeated repair visits.¹²

Then came the appeal — and this is the honest part

Jury verdicts in lemon cases are a starting point, not always the ending. The Court of Appeal affirmed in part and reversed in part:²

• A $2,298 optional service contract was ruled not recoverable as restitution — it isn't a manufacturer-installed option.
• Insurance-premium recovery was trimmed to property-damage coverage only.
• The civil penalty — the biggest number on the board — was sent back for a new trial on the question of willfulness.

The owner asked the California Supreme Court to step in; it declined in December 2024, making the appellate ruling final.³ So the jury's $127,976.70 was not the final word — the doubling that made this case famous went back to Los Angeles Superior Court to be fought again.

And the fight still isn't over. We pulled the Los Angeles court docket: as of its June 2026 entries — twelve years after the Optima rolled off the lot — the penalty retrial still hasn't happened. Trial dates were continued in April, May, and June of 2026, and by late June the owner's lawyers were asking the court to force Kia's "person most qualified" to sit for a deposition, sanctions requested.⁴

Let that sink in: a man bought a sedan in 2014 with 19 miles on it, won at trial, won the right to a penalty retrial on appeal — and in 2026 the lawyers are still fighting about depositions. That is how seriously manufacturers litigate the penalty. It's the number that turns a refund into real exposure, and it's worth a decade of lawyering to fight. We're watching the docket and will report the ending when it comes.

How does one lemon take twelve years?

Here is the whole chronology, from the public record:¹²⁴

When	What happened
May 10, 2014	The Optima is bought new — 19 miles on it
Aug 2014 – Dec 2015	Six-plus repair visits; dealers can never replicate the reverse-gear problem
Feb 9, 2016	Kia sends a three-option letter: replace the car, repurchase it for $11,800.36 plus the loan payoff, or $10,000 as goodwill. The offer lapses with no response
Sept 8, 2016	He sues
May 2022	The jury trial — nearly six years after filing. The opinion doesn't say why; the span covers LA's chronic civil backlog and the pandemic years, when civil jury trials largely stopped
Aug 2022	The trial court strikes the penalty and grants a new trial on it
Aug–Sept 2024	The Court of Appeal rules; the penalty goes back down
Dec 2024	The Supreme Court declines review
June 2026	Still no retrial — the lawyers are fighting over depositions

To be fair to everyone in that table: the record doesn't tell us whether the 2016 offer was a good one — that depends on his loan balance and what the statute owed him, and the jury still found Kia's conduct willful. What the record does tell us is what the fight has cost in time: a decade and counting.

The trade-off this case teaches

California's lemon law now offers exactly this choice, explicitly. Kia joined the state's rapid-buyback system on May 1, 2025 — it's on our live Opt-In Tracker. The same dispute, started today, would run on a clock: written notice, an offer within about 30 days, a completed buyback within 60. The price of that speed: the civil penalty — the doubling that made this verdict famous — is largely off the table for a manufacturer that complies.

That's the real decision a lemon owner faces now. The fast lane trades leverage for your life back. The courtroom path preserves the big number — this jury doubled the award — but Valdovinos has been waiting since 2016, and his penalty still isn't decided. Neither answer is wrong; what's wrong is choosing without knowing the trade. Talk to a lawyer before you pick a lane.

Why "willful" is the hinge

The refund half of a lemon case is mechanical: purchase price back, minus a mileage offset for the miles driven before the first repair attempt. The civil penalty is where a case changes shape. The jury has to find the manufacturer knew it owed a repurchase and didn't act — a finding built from repair orders, arbitration records, and the paper trail of a buyback that never came.

The refund is arithmetic. The penalty is a verdict on how the manufacturer behaved — and it's the number both sides fight hardest over.

What you should know

• The penalty is not automatic — most settled cases resolve without one, which is one reason manufacturers settle.
• Under the state's new rapid-repurchase rules (in force for suits filed since spring 2025), a manufacturer that completes a timely buyback after pre-suit notice can shield itself from the penalty entirely — a trade the biggest holdout brands have not taken. We track who opted in — with each manufacturer's pre-suit notice contact — on our live Opt-In Tracker.
• Every figure above is from the jury's verdict and the Court of Appeal's published opinion — this story cites the record, not a press release, including the parts that cut against the headline number.¹²