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Comment by greatpatton | Hacker News Reader

Not much into US law, but can someone tell us what is happening if you had personal possession of value in your car?

The same as would happen in any other repo case. The repo agent bags them, writes an inventory of them, and must return them on request. Different states have different laws on the conditions on that. Most don't allow any fees to be charged for this, but generally you have to go get them, they won't be brought to you.

Huge amounts of stuff is never returned, either because the repo guys were careless/stole it, because retrieving is hard/inconvenient for someone who no longer has a car, or because the owners just don't care.

This is my problem with it.

Not that payments shouldn't be kept up to date. But that it moves decision making on the issue to a corporate entity a million miles away and you can bet there won't be any accounting for personal situations, or admin errors, or anything else. Your car will just be gone.

Sorry, f@ck tesla on this.

If this wasn't preceded by months of angry letters explaining when and why the security would be repossessed, then yes. Shitty. However, if the owner was made aware that the vehicle would be reposessed, then obviously there isn't much else the lender can do. The owner has (hopefully) already dodged several opportunities to simply drop the vehicle off.

> Your car will just be gone

If the loan is secured on the car then it's not "your car" until the loan is paid.

But sure you're right, mistakes can be made and being able to switch off your car remotely is somewhat dystopian even if you're 100% in the clear.

No, there are consumer protection laws in most, if not all, states that require a period of notification and discussion prior to repossession. When a car is repossessed it should never be a surprise to the "owner."

With respect, I've seen the suprise element happen too often for it to be considered rare (possibly different country, different legalities, but still, it's a global company.

Mail goes to the wrong address, e-mail ends up in spam (looking at you, Google), a pin code is lost, meaning you need time to identify yourself or etc etc etc and you're basically lucky or not as to you you're dealing with as to how it gets resolved.

I agree that I should not have used the word "never" in my comment. Thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps "unlikely" would be better. You are correct that sometimes stuff just happens, but after volunteering with a financial counseling program, I do think most people know when they have stopped making payments and most banks make lots of calls and send several letters before they go grab the property. There are exceptions of course, such as third tier used car dealerships which push the laws to the limit to make the repossession happen as quickly as possible. Sadly, people with the most fragile financial situations are much more likely to deal with the most predatory lenders.

Many people living on the edge financially are so stressed that they have trouble prioritizing things in what would seem to be a logical choice to someone on the outside. What is often not understood is that honest (and early) conversations with lenders can frequently lead to adjusted terms to help people get through a difficult period. Without that conversation, they lose transportation access which leads to reduction in job opportunities, and then the whole thing starts to spiral. Very difficult.

Agree with most of that, but I'm not even thinking about those in fragile circumstances at this point (although that is clearly an issue).

I mean, I wasn't even searching for this, but this appeared in my twitter feed this morning. For your consumption:

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1473187956022251523

I just don't trust companies generally in these situations.

If lenders had to take "personal situations" into account no loans would be made. Anyone can come up with a sob story.

That's the purpose of allowing sob stories by people that advocate for that approach. The real idea is to choke the system to death and crash it de facto.

That's how you get insane squatting laws where you can't remove people that are illegally occupying your property (house, apartment, etc) for years. The process becomes badly choked in the sob story process which the squatter takes advantage of.

And very obviously all that would happen if you allowed the sob story process to become common in auto loans, is a huge backlog of people would become delinquent and abuse it, knowing they can drag out the consequences for a very long time.

Are you saying it's better to take loans from the local mafia.

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1473187956022251523

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