US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans • Hacker News Board

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#121

Post by linguae » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:56 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #64

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to find a new mechanic if it is taking them an entire day to replace tires or do an oil change.

Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking. As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a f…

Unfortunately, there are some apartment complexes, HOAs, and city ordinances that prohibit people from working on their cars, which means either needing to find a legal place to do your own repairs or paying a mechanic. I’ve lived in apartments my entire adult life thus far, and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds. I have no choice but to either find a friend with a garage (not easy in the Bay Area when most of my friends can’t afford garages) or taking my car to a mechanic and paying Bay Area labor costs.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#122

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

olyjohn wrote: post #76

micromacrofoot wrote: post #43

Also worth noting the average new car is now $50k and the average new car loan is $40k+ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/17/50000-new... Starting to find out the risks of a car-centric society in a slow-burn economic crisis.

Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.

Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.

This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#123

Post by _heimdall » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

mgh95 wrote: post #99

_heimdall wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing against other currencies are tricky, they often move in a similar direction at different rates.

Exactly what people are saying here (the USD is weakening at an alarming pace! Americans are going Weimar Republic!) isn't borne out in the data. We aren't seeing the USD weaken against other countries in an independent manner. That's the point; not to prove that we are seeing a stalwart dollar, but that we are seeing roughly "business as usual".

There are concerning scenarios when all currencies lose, or gain, spending power at a similar rate.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#124

Post by epistasis » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

mgh95 wrote: post #106

cogman10 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BRL or CNY is probably one of the most apt comparison given the BRICKS alliance. That's where you are seeing the roughly 10% swing since Jan. (if you go back to last Oct the swing is less pronounced. IDK exactly what was happening last Oct, but there appears to have been an upswing in dollar value from Oct to Jan and a steady decrease of the dollar value since.)

In October of last year, people were betting on Trumps election leading to tariffs leading to a stronger dollar. This trend continued post-election pre-inaguration. Since the tariffs did not materialize to the level expected, the dollar weakened to its levels prior to his election.

Your explanation makes no sense. First, nobody thought that Trump would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump. So the dollar started to devalue when people realized that "holy shit these tariffs might actually happen." The tariffs are way way bigger than anybody expected.

The entire goal of the tariffs were to weaken the dollar:

> The Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposed economic and trade initiative of the Donald Trump administration during his second term. Named after Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the Accord is a blueprint for restructuring global trade and monetary relations. Its core goal is to devalue the dollar while preserving its role as the world reserve currency, a careful balancing act intended to avoid the contradictions described in the Triffin paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_Accord

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#125

Post by jeffbee » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #115

NegativeK wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most places I've lived, busses are for poor people. Because anyone else will pay whatever it takes to get a car and avoid something like a _three hour_ round trip for something 10 miles away. I'm not kidding; my work commute is 10 miles each way, in a city of way more than 1M, and it's 1.5 hours total for me to get to work on time. I've lived in one place where they were great. Dense urban environments can do that…

I've lived in a couple places with public transit way faster and more efficient than cars. But because it's public, people can't be easily kicked off. Once I was caught between a knife fight; another time a schizophrenic person started to aggressively trap me in the corner while going on an increasing paranoid tirade. Not long after that I bought a bicycle.

A bicycle is pretty much always going to beat a bus over reasonable distances, on performance alone, not even counting the crazy people.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#126

Post by alephnerd » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

achierius wrote: post #59

ramesh31 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions. Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since w…

Haha, funnily enough they said the same thing before 1918. They also said a bunch of Vietnamese farmers could never beat a world class military. Have faith in your fellow workers and hold on to the hope that a better world is possible.

As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.

There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.

Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.

Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.

It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.

The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#127

Post by autoexec » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

This goes way beyond the high price of cars or people taking out loans with bad terms.

Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.

Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#128

Post by temp_praneshp » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #21

hyghjiyhu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done it myself but isn't a tire change suppose to be pretty easy thing to do, certainly better than sitting the whole day in the shop?

Usually it involves swapping the new tires onto the rims. It's not easy to do.

definitely not easy by yourself, but the whole process (change, then alignment etc) shouldn't take a decent mechanic's shop more than a couple of hours. I've changed tires on my nearly 200k mile car several times now, and it's usually a few days for the tires to be delivered (in america the mechanic will just receive it) and a 2h appt to get the work done. I'm shocked your parent comment mentioned waiting a whole day at the mechanics'.

My friend does this at Costco, and it takes longer purely because of appt mismanagement and backup, the work itself is quick.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#129

Post by watwut » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 11:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #30

dijit wrote: post #2

It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alternatives require far too much investment to make worthwhile. I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot mor…

This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather. Being tied t…

Isn't America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.

Also, you cant do work in car either. You have to drive and actually pay attention. You cant (or should not) just listen to podcast or loosing yourself in the music. You dont get health benefits of walking a bit or of popping int the store on the way to buy food quickly.

My point here is that if public transport and city are semi reasonably organized, the car has to be actually seriously faster to be worth it.

Re: US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

#130

Post by epistasis » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC

mgh95 wrote: post #86

epistasis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

That operates on calendar year. That is primarily due to the rapid appreciation of the USD vs global based after Trumps election on the perception that tariffs would be far higher and more continuous than they actually were. The truth is, the currency markets are roughly where they were about a year ago, with the exception of EUR, but thats a special case which I think is a symbol if a misstep by the ECB.

Yes, the calendar year matches what I was talking about, and more closely matches the current economic policy of the US. It wasn't until February that the real economic and foreign policy of the US became clear, and the full insanity of it all is still sinking in.

I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.

This is the goal of the Trump administration and what is apparent to analysts.