A total of 308 buyers of Ford Fiesta and Focus cars have won a class action lawsuit against Ford Sales and Service (Thailand) after the Bangkok South Civil Court ordered the car company to pay them a total of 23 million baht to compensate for defective vehicles.

The verdict was delivered by the court this morning in what was billed as the country’s first “big” class action case involving altogether 308 plaintiffs.

However, the court ruled that 12 of the plaintiffs would not be entitled to the compensation because they equipped their cars with LPG gas cylinders and that they did not bring their cars to the company’s service centre for repairs of clutch and gear systems which were claimed by the plaintiffs of being defective.

One of the plaintiffs told the media after the delivering of the court’s verdict that besides compensation that they had demanded from the car company, they also wanted the court to set a precedent that car manufacturers must produce cars up to the internationally-accepted standards and that they must not take advantage of the consumers.

The lawsuit was instituted to the court on April 3, 2017.