Repo man is always inside
Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
141–150 of 568 posts
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#142This illustrates a problem with current penalties - they're too harsh if you have 100% exact enforcement. Violating auto speed limits is a good example. Society can't enforce speed limits 100% of the time if it relies on the occasional state trooper with a radar gun. Therefore society sets the penalty very high so that the small risk of a citation isn't worth the benefit of speeding. 100% enforcement should have much…
Virtually every serious speeder I know runs laser jammers, radar detectors, and cell phone based monitoring and religiously is alert to the warnings. Short of aircraft enforcement (oh they monitor that too) it's about impossible to nab the most dedicated speeders, so most the tickets are going people like the soccer mom who went 10 over, etc. I feel like speeding enforcement is one of the biggest example of how these enforcement are designed as tax and not designed as population level risk mitigation.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#143[deleted]
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#144I work in security and anti-fraud is the use case of last resort for terrible ideas. When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion. The reason we have laws is so that peo…
> When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you
Is it not correct that the lending entity you use to purchase a vehicle is the party that legally owns it? The borrower has possession and right to use the vehicle, but the lender holds the title. That's why you get the title transferred over to your name once the balance of the load is repaid.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#145Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever. It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
Good luck buying it outright - and even if you do, new cars are all delivered with a bunch of tech that takes away your control and it gets worse every year.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon says I'm lazy. I think he's a joke. Folks told me to learn to code. That's great, but now I'm broke.
Little do they know, I might not be thrifty. But I still have my ol' F150.
And my tractor tole' me I don't matter, ever since John Deere told me to Steer clear, from them old repairs. Used to be, you could fix'em for free, now it's all John Deere IP.
Edit: And Monsanto, don't you know, told me ya'best not go, usin' your own seeds.
(no joke folks, I think there's some real potential for a satire country song here, I'm thinkin' by a Jonathan Coulton type singer)
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 1970s my dad found that American car dealerships had no interest in selling small and economical cars at all. Japanese car dealerships have been this way recently, before the pandemic hit we tried to buy a new Honda Fit and had to buy a used one because they had none in inventory because, allegedly, the factory had washed away in a flood but they had a row of 50 CR-Vs made in the same factory. The dealer tried…
"The automotive press uncritically reports that American consumers are crazy about huge vehicles but what I've observed is that dealers are crazy about selling huge vehicles." Very true. Same for houses. A lot of people probably would prefer a small house over not being able to afford a big house and renting eternally. But big houses are more profitable, so that's what's being built. That's why in a lot of markets su…
In both scenarios there are laws encouraging these outcomes. Minimum lot sizes and CAFE standards, respectively, lead to bigger cars and houses. There are also small utility trucks and electric vehicles in other countries, but they’re unfortunately illegal in the land of the free, ostensibly for crash test performance opposite the giant trucks that are considered safe. Indeed, distorted markets are worse.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#148I work in security and anti-fraud is the use case of last resort for terrible ideas. When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you. A technology like this means that the vehicle still belongs to Ford, which means if something goes wrong with it, or if you get sciatica from their shitty seats, you can class action sue them into oblivion. The reason we have laws is so that peo…
> When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you.
The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. I would not say the vehicle legally belongs to a borrower until they have possession of the title.
> The reason we have laws is so that people have recourse to principle, whereas when you implement something like this in hardware (a car), it's dystopian vigilantism.
The legal system is costly to use. Reducing the costs to repossess collateral would reduce borrowing costs, and ultimately help borrowers with lower borrowing costs because there is less expense towards repossession.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take my angry upvote. "My truck done left me and my cellphone said I'm broke"
FWIW, this was the number one comment yesterday on the Reddit thread about this.
When I read the parent comment, I thought “Am I on Reddit?”.
HN used to bury Reddit-like comments a while back, but it seems the Reddit influence is becoming more and more accepted on HN these days, as I’m starting to see them more at the top vs. the bottom of threads.
Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments
#150Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever. It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
Any user interface will be misused, so "click to repo" will mostly be used accidentally in error. The vast majority of cars are not repo'd and as such the vast majority of clicks on the "repo" button will be in error. The customer service rep will be trying to click "x" to close some other website's popups or they thought they were clicking "reset" but that's right next to "repo". Or the new hire is told to click "repo" on every loan with no payment last month; I made no payment last month because I made my final payment two months ago but it hasn't closed out the process.
There will be a few high profile stories of cars driving off with newborn babies strapped in the car seat, then the tech will be banned.
Weirdly enough by patenting the business method, this makes every car mfgr OTHER than Ford much more appealing, so what we really is patent trolls as a service patenting really bad ideas to make sure nobody can implement them. I don't think Ford's new invention was intended to get me to buy a Toyota. Patenting bad ideas as a weapon is an interesting concept. Other than the obvious fraud issue, what's to stop me from filing a REALLY bad idea patent, then selling the stock short, then drumming up some PR, then closing out my short position at profit? At some point this is inevitable as "the internet" along with "the stock market" and everything else becomes more bot than human.