In American English, a lemon is a vehicle that turns out to have several manufacturing issues affecting its safety, value or utility. Any vehicle with such severe issues may be termed a lemon, and by extension, so may any product with flaws too great or severe to serve its purpose. Terminology The concept of describing a highly flawed item as a "lemon" predates its use in describing cars and can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century as a British and American slang term. The British use is derived from the US use and is less precise or specific: to be "sold a lemon" is little different from "sold a pup". Its first attribution to mean a problematic car was in a Volkswagen advertisement created by Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone as part of an advertisement campaign managed by William Bernbach, all advertising executives with the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1960, which was a follow-up to their Think Small advertising campaign for VW. Economist George Akerlof in his 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" identified the severe lemon problems that may afflict markets characterized by asymmetrical information. Laws New vehicles New vehicles may contain flaws or defects in workmanship, caused by design flaws or by an error during the automotive factory build process. These errors can range from parts being installed incorrectly to a tool that was used to build the car not being removed or a batch of materials with structural or chemical flaws. The idiom "Friday afternoon car" was used to describe new cars that had been delivered with numerous faults or suffered from an excessive number of warranty claims early in their lives – based on the premise that assembly line workers were far more likely to make errors at the times when they were perceived to be least interested in the standard of their workmanship. Consumer protection legislation typically labels vehicles as "lemons" if the same problem recurs despite multiple repair attempts (such as three times in a row over a short period, where previous attempts have not corrected the problem) or where defects have caused a new vehicle to be out of service for a prolonged period (typically 30 days or longer) for repairs. Lemon laws primarily serve to force manufacturers to buy back defective vehicles or exchange them. Depending on the jurisdiction, a process