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Moore v. Coachmen Industries Inc.5/5/1998
press or implied warranties against defendants Sportscoach and its parent company, defendant Coachmen. See Acceptance Corp. v. Spencer, 268 N.C. 1, 149 S.E.2d 570 (1966)(stating that, generally, there is no vicarious liability under North Carolina law if the parent and subsidiary corporations are entirely separate legal entities and there is no showing of fraud). Accordingly, plaintiffs' fourth and fifth claims for relief for breach of express or implied warranties against defendants Coachmen and Sportscoach were barred by the language of the Limited Warranty, and summary judgment was proper as to those claims.
2. Defendant MagneTek
We note that the liability of defendant MagneTek presents this Court with a novel question: whether a remote supplier/manufacturer of a component part, which is then integrated into a finished product, may be protected by a limited warranty which makes no express reference to coverage of that component supplier/manufacturer, or specifically, that part supplied by the component supplier/manufacturer. As discussed below, we answer in the affirmative.
Because there is no case law directly on point in this instance, we have extrapolated from some principles of law utilized in deciding warranty liability issues from other jurisdictions. In regards to the construction of express warranties and their coverage it has been explained, "When the buyer purchases an operating machine, the seller cannot claim that the defects were in component parts supplied by others and therefore not covered by the warranty." 67A Am. Jur. 2d Sales ยง 727 (1985)(citing Polycon Industries, Inc. v. Hercules, Inc., 471 F. Supp. 1316 (E.D. Wis. 1979)). More pointedly, in regards to construction of warranty disclaimers, most jurisdictions require that a manufacturer seeking to disclaim implied warranties be able to point to a disclaimer which expressly mentions the manufacturer as excluding certain or all implied warranties either by doing so in the materials it includes with the goods or by joining as a disclaiming seller in the contract between the retailer and the remote purchaser. Donald F. Clifford, Express Warranty Liability of Remote Sellers: One Purchase, Two Relationships, 75 Wash. U. L.Q. 413, 445-46 (1997). However, it has been noted that while a manufacturer may "effectively disclaim its warranty liability either by including a disclaimer in the materials that accompany the product or by insisting that the retailer include the manufacturer's disclaimer in the sales contract with the consumer," Hininger v. Case Corp., 23 F.3d 124, 129 (citing Clark v. DeLaval Separator Corp., 639 F.2d 1320, (5th Cir. 1981)), reh'g denied, 32 F.3d 568 (5th Cir. 1994), cert. denied, 513 U.S. 1079, 130 L. Ed. 2d 632 (1995), "`it may be difficult or even impossible for a component supplier to disclaim its warranty liability.'" Id. (quoting Patty Precision Products v. Brown & Sharpe Mfg., 846 F.2d 1247, 1257 (10th Cir. 1988)(Logan, J. Concurring in part and Dissenting in part)). The court in Hininger concluded that because component part suppliers cannot effectively disclaim implied warranties, and purchasers have no expectation that component part suppliers will respond to defects in finished products, a purchaser cannot recover for economic loss from a component supplier under breach of the implied warranty of merchantability. Id. at 129.
A component supplier's inability to disclaim implied warranties is particularly important in light of the abolition of the privity requirement in regards to implied warranty claims. The primary reason that the privity requirement was abolished in implied warranty actions was the manufacturer could limit unforeseeable and unlimited liability by discl
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