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

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211–220 of 568 posts

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

#211

True story: my neighbor's lease payment was under, by a dollar or two, no more. An error in his banking practices, I guess. They came and repossessed it in the middle of the night. He offered to pay, and they wouldn't take a credit card, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, wire transfer, or any other modern form of payment. No, he had to go to Western Union. Someone who's more up on this sort of stuff can explain that. A week late…

Who was he offering to pay to? The repo guys? Western Union just makes it sound like a scam.

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

#212
post #7

Uhm, it seems like the auto industry is still letting its imagination run away with self driving cars. I don't see how a patent like this can be granted if we still generally don't have working self-driving cars. Even Tesla is getting forced to admit that "Full Self Driving" isn't really full self driving.

Maybe this is a good thing. A lot of stupid patents will all expire by the time they could actually be used.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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), i…

> The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. This varies a lot by state. A lot (most?) states the title absolutely goes to the purchaser but it has a lien attached that gives the lender rights of repossession.

Interesting, I thought it was only sent to you after the final loan payment.

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

#214

I 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), i…

> > 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.

Maybe the confusion comes from the meaning of "owning". There are essentially three parts to ownership: the right to sell, to rent, and to use. A full owner has all three, but there are situation where they are distinct and the "owner" may be different depending on which aspect you consider. So when usage is considered, the borrower is the owner, the lender can't get into the car and drive, but when sales are considered, the lender can sell the car and get money from it, the borrower can't (at least not before the loan is fully paid).

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

#215
post #36

Well 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.

> the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy. I've said this a couple of times before, but I find it fairly astonishing that we don't have legislation covering what manufacturers are allowed to do to a product with embedded devices after a user has purchased it. I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest o…

> I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest of the manufacturer is essentially breaking and entering (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)).

Man, do I have bad news for you about everything.

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

#216
post #186

I would really like to buy such car!

As if you'd "buy" such a car. I imagine Ford would love getting rid of the idea of car ownership in exchange for years-long rentals, as long as you keep paying them for the privilege.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the cost of repossession is low it also means that riskier buyers are more likely to get financed.

This is a pretty naive take if you're trying to paint it as enabling an even better outcome for "riskier buyers" This article is something like 5-10 years behind reality: Right now subprime auto loans are mostly enforced with GPS trackers that buyers are usually not made properly aware of, or even worse, tricked into paying for as an add-on pitched as being for their own benefit. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/bu…

People who give out car loans want you to pay back the loan. They don't want to repossess the vehicle. There is a real cost associated with it and you can't just take the car and make a profit. You'd be able to recoup what was owed and some costs may not be coupable. Again, they're not in the business to lend out money to people they know that can't afford it. There may be fraud at the individual level but the system doesn't work like that.

The recovery rates for subprime auto deals are historically around 50%

https://www.fitchratings.com/research/structured-finance/soa...

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

#218
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repos are extremely costly. My friend let his car get repossessed because he did not need it anymore thinking that was easier than selling it and there wouldn't be any negatives other than on his credit. He was surprised to get sued for the cost of the repo, which was thousands plus they managed to sell the car for much less than it was worth.

I wonder how costly it would be if one of these self-driving cars killed a bystander while repo-ing itself.

Probably similar in cost to the people killed by human tow truck drivers.

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

#219
I'm sure they'll put a very robust algorithm in place to ensure no wrongful repossessions will happen. I'm also sure that, if they ever somehow did, there will be a very accessible customer service system that will be able to resolve the issue.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The title stays with the lender until all the payments are made per the loan agreement. This varies a lot by state. A lot (most?) states the title absolutely goes to the purchaser but it has a lien attached that gives the lender rights of repossession.

Interesting, I thought it was only sent to you after the final loan payment.

Just because they hold the title for security doesn't mean it's not in your name.
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