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Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

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Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#161

Post by lotsofpulp »

daveslash wrote: post #154
bm3719 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's what I thought too. I got pulled over once and the cop asked me " Is this your car? ". I replied " Well, no... the bank owns it, but they let me drive it ". He was not amused, but I was not being snarky -- I took the question to mean: " Do you own this car? ", and the honest answer was no - at least, as I understood it, because the owner name on the title was the bank, not mine.

I assume the majority of people would understand the cop’s question as “Are you the person responsible and have the legal right to control this vehicle right now in this very moment”.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#162

Post by 20after4 »

kube-system wrote: post #128
PaulHoule wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my neighborhood. The Blue Honda Fit is the ideal getaway car in Tompkins County because you could do donuts in somebody's yard and they tell the cops and then they'd have to flag down every 20th car.

They're great cars, but (unfortunately) compact SUVs are far outselling them. Compare the Fit and HRV sales figures and it's clear why Honda did it.

That assumes that sales figures are entirely controlled by demand. The OP points out a perfectly plausible mechanism by which demand is not the only factor affecting sales volume. It's almost certainly true that dealerships will stock what's profitable, customer preferences be damned.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#163

Post by tarotuser »

jader201 wrote: post #149
rootusrootus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a great way to get up to the 500+ threshold as a full account here on HN.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#164

Post by zamalek »

I can just imagine the chaos caused by 100s of thousands of cars simultaneously re-possessing themselves due to a bug. And the inevitable victims, that are up to date on their payments, without access to their car in an emergency due to a bug.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#165

Post by ffgh »

Having worked in the repossession industry I can tell you it's a messy one. It's become such a sh*t show between vendors and the actual agents/companies, it's a fight to who can bid the lowest for each car. Also I'm not sure how this will work, there is so much regulation in the repossession industry.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#166

Post by lotsofpulp »

20after4 wrote: post #162
kube-system wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're great cars, but (unfortunately) compact SUVs are far outselling them. Compare the Fit and HRV sales figures and it's clear why Honda did it.

That assumes that sales figures are entirely controlled by demand. The OP points out a perfectly plausible mechanism by which demand is not the only factor affecting sales volume. It's almost certainly true that dealerships will stock what's profitable, customer preferences be damned.

This would assume that either the only game in town is Honda or that all the other manufacturers are colluding with Honda. Absent significant evidence, it is safer to assume people’s preferences are causing the lower sales.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#167

Post by macinjosh »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #19
macinjosh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that no one at the patent office cares if your invention works or not.

That's not really true. It has to at least be plausible. Usually. One exception that comes to mind is a couple of patents some physicist working for the US Navy created that probably aren't real technology. Anti-gravity devices and the like. Why they admitted those? No idea, but possibly this was done as part of some sort of hearkening back to the cold-war-era strategy of 'waste the enemies resources on a goose chase…

Very interesting, TIL!

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#168

Post by logicalmonster »

bediger4000 wrote: post #12

This 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…

Whether or not 100% enforcement is ever possible, I think speeding is penalized only because it's an easy thing to objectively measure, even if you can't get 100% of it. This is sort of the McNamara Fallacy in action.

But the really dangerous people on the highway aren't typical speeders who might go say 85-90mph when the speed limit is 55-65 mph. In traffic that isn't dense and clustered, high speeds in and of themselves are not a big problem.

The really dangerous people on the highway are those who aggressively change lanes in dense traffic, weaving in and out of traffic trying to find the narrowest possible gap to slip through where no safe passing gap exists. This is much harder to objectively track and measure unless a cop happens to sneak up on the dangerous driver and sees them firsthand.

Counterintuitively, I believe that the highways are made far less safe from speed limits because this tends to cluster up all traffic together so impatient people (who are going to exist no matter what) are compelled to dangerously weave in and out of dense clusters of cars which is the most likely thing to cause an accident.

If you made one or two lanes available with no speed limit so the aggressive drivers could be free to have their way and don't have to interact through slow drivers, I'd bet that most problems on the road would be solved. You want to create a situation where impatient people don't have to interact with the slower drivers.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#169

Post by VLM »

PaulHoule wrote: post #94
sokoloff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly (on both sides). We should help people to find and choose cars they can afford. And, when someone does not pay as agreed to a significant degree, the more efficient that a repossession can happen, the better a deal can be offered to borrowers who do pay as agreed.

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…

Most of the costs of manufacture are fixed or at most scale linear with mass, so the range of costs to mfgr the smallest commuter car vs the hugest truck are, at most, perhaps 3 to 1 but more realistically 2 to 1.

"The market will bear" a consumer paying 5 to 10 times as much for the largest fanciest SUV or pickup truck vs the smallest cheapest commuter car. Therefore the profit is VASTLY higher on larger cars and there's an immense motivation to get as many customers as possible into the biggest cars. If you can get a customer to pay 6 times as much for a SUV that costs 3 times as much to make, that's a huge profit lost if the customer is permitted to buy the commuter car.

Another way to phrase it is if almost all your profit comes from selling giant cars, then the customer experience of buying a small car is always going to be awful.

The people buying the largest vehicles are not concerned by cost, so increasing the cost of large vehicles via taxes or fees or regulation only makes the situation worse. You'd like to think that a 20% surcharge on large cars would result in fewer large cars sold, but the guy buying them is a general contractor and he needs the pickup truck to make money so he's just going to pass the cost on to real estate inflation and the extra 20% is going to motivate the dealership even harder to only sell expensive cars.

Re: Future Fords could repossess themselves and drive away if you miss payments

#170

Post by sacnoradhq »

RobotToaster wrote: post #10

Great, now we're going to get country music about how some guy's truck left him.

With narrow AI, the truck will drive to the Austin-Bergstrom airport and launch a generative country music career. (There are venues at AUS where country music legends play.)
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