I purchased a brand new 2008 BMW 328i for $38,000 from Sonnen BMW in San Rafael, California. The car had a serious manufacturers defect that caused an electrical fire and resulted in my car being totaled. I had multiple issues with the front passengers side fog light falling out of its casing into the lower corner of the bumper which caused three separate fires. BMW has refused to replace my vehicle that had 11,500 miles and is covered under warranty.

At the end of June 2008 I first realized this problem happened upon a closer inspection of the exterior of the car. I brought the car right away to Sonnen BMW's service department, as I was worried about the safety of the vehicle. I showed them what happened, but they told me that they had no available appointments until two weeks out and that my car was safe to drive. Two weeks later I brought my vehicle to Sonnen's service department, they "verified the defect" as stated in their service records. They replaced the complete front bumper and supposedly re secured the foglight. All of this was covered under BMW's warranty as it was a manufactures defect. I asked Tom Murtha (my service advisor) why this had happened, he told that because there was absolutely no impact damage, the only way this could have occurred was a mistake when building the vehicle at the factory.

My life was put in danger because of a manufacturers malfunction, It was their fault and they don't want to help me even though their warranty says they have to. If I had been on the highway there would be a very high chance that I would have crashed, become trapped in the car and burnt to death. Are we going to have to wait until someone dies from this? There should be some sort of recall. Mr. Kossar told me that each time I made Sonnen BMW aware of the situation they should have removed the fuse in the circuit board that controls the fog lights.

Because BMW has not taken responsibility and said that this is an insurance matter. I lost $11,200

they were very professional in their way of communicating with the customers... they are willing to do business and go down on price if they need to... shop around and you will see...