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Comment by hd95489 | Hacker News Reader

I hope they defend it with a vengeance so nobody can copy it

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see this as particularly evil. It's just a more efficient of what already happens in terms of care repossession.

What needs to happen is better consumer protection to prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford.

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.

> Exactly (on both sides). We should help people to find and choose cars they can afford.

I'd personally much prefer to make public transit that is so good that everyone uses it.

No such thing exists.

Sure. Make better public transit and many people will choose the null car.

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 to push us into one of those.

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. Before the pandemic you would frequently see small cars were selling out as fast they arrived on the lot but dealers would have a sea of huge and expensive vehicles and be offering $8000 or so in incentives to sell them. If small vehicles were really unpopular it would be the other way around.

There are rumors that Toyota and Honda would love to kill the Corolla and Civic but the quality of those vehicles is so legendary and the attachment of owners is so fanatical that they know people aren't going to "trade up" but will be paying new car prices for high mileage vehicles.

Your dealer doesn't know what they're talking about, which is par for the course. You couldn't find a Fit because Honda stopped importing them. They were discontinued in the US due to poor sales.

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.

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.

Where I live, all of the major new car dealerships are owned by the same company.

No I'm not making this up: https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/business/2014/10/02/w...

This is true in my town. Believe it or not some customers and employees really love some car dealers and speak reverently about them and that was true of the last Toyota dealer but it is not true of the current one.

It's not hard in a small market. Often, large dealership chains don't put all their eggs in one brand basket. It works the same way in other cities, but larger cities can support multiple dealers of the same brand.

HRV sales have consistently blown away even the all-time peak year of US Fit sales.

"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 supply and demand don't really work if the supply can be restricted.

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.

Always seems bizarre to me I can ride an ATV around or even a motorcycle on the highway, but a cheap 1980s style Honda CRV is apparently to unsafe to sell anymore because it doesn't meet crash test standards.

Theoretically CAFE standards should be work for encourage small cars. Regulators shouldn't give bad fuel bonus for big cars.

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.

You’re giving Ford the benefit of the doubt that it will work as described and won’t be abused.

Have they earned that reputation regarding automated systems, and how will they deal with false positive/bugs etc. when the wrong car is repossessed at the worst time for its owner ?

I suspect it would be dealt with in the same way that human error is dealt with today.

Which means, not at all, look at the recent Hertz case about rental cars reported as stolen and then doubling down, because admitting to problems with the process would mean admitting to criminal intent.

Repos and reporting cars as stolen are two different things.

The poster was talking about "human error". If you are out of a car because your lender messed up (perhaps intentionally to pocket the late fee) you are in trouble, because everyone needs a vehicle to get to work on time. And of course you have as much recourse against your lender as the people at the receiving end of the Hertz case. Didn't Peter Thiel say you need a seven-figure sum to make the legal system work for you?

I don't disagree with the end point, but I have a hard time understanding why the Hertz case demonstrates that Ford is likely to lie with criminal intent about a mistaken repo. It has literally nothing in common except that it involves a car.

If Ford wants to lie about repos or lie about human error, they can do that now, they don't need a computer to do it. The whole damn process is subject to human error as it is today.

The reduction of friction has me worried here. Nowadays you have to get a tow truck out to retrieve the vehicle, and you have an incentive not to do that pointlessly. But once the car can drive itself back to the dealership the bar will be lowered pretty quickly.

It's all the same to the lender, no? They file the correct paperwork to do it, and it is handled by some outside process.

On the "people lying" side of the issue you're describing, up until now a tow company needed to be involved. With this system, the middle man is gone, so potentially a single employee could initiate repossesion of a whole fleet by themself.

Will the owners have recourse after being stranded without their car explaining their boss it just went away ? probably. Will the employee be punished ? surely. Is it something we want to allow on the first place ? I'm mot so sure.

Here we're really digging on the "working as intended" side, bit the more probable issues would be it's just buggy and sometimes an older cars thinks it got repossessed, goes away, and you're left to battle for getting reparations and/or another car, knowing you're probably broke so not in a strong position for that.

> On the "people lying" side of the issue you're describing, up until now a tow company needed to be involved. With this system, the middle man is gone, so potentially a single employee could initiate repossesion of a whole fleet by themself.

Tow truck drivers don't currently play any role in certifying the requests they get. A bank emails them repo paperwork, and they tow the car. If the paperwork they receive is not correct, they would have no way of even knowing that. In fact, the human tow truck drivers themselves create another layer of possibility for human mistakes.

I can see it now: A cash-strapped, frazzled single-mom parks her car on her driveway to unload groceries, leaving her child in the car seat while she carries bags inside the garage. While the mom is walking toward the door the car repossesses itself and heads back to the dealership, child trapped inside.

After this happens the first time they will add some kind of checking mechanism which means you can defeat repossession by putting a doll sitting on some bricks in a child car seat to avoid this happening automatically.

haha! At this rate, in the future, fooling an AI will be considered a form of hacking and met with computer fraud and abuse or inauthentic behavior charges.

> prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford

The issue is that "Making finance accessible to low income Americans" and "predatory lending" are approximately two sides of the same coin. And so it is not politically popular.

That's part of the narrative for the financial crisis. Even without waging that particular fight, it's important to remember that, for a long time, there were plenty of barriers to full participation that had nothing to do with the individual's ability to afford something. Redlining is probably the best documented of these practices.

Every creditworthiness measure is subject to some bias. Most practical ways of tightening lending is going to end up with some correlative demographic being disproportionately excluded.

Lowering the cost of repossession lowers the risk/cost to lending to low income. It's good for the poor.

Yes, I agree with that.

In theory it should but I’m practice it probably won’t since the market isn’t actually competitive

> care repossession

Does autocorrect make Freudian slips?

People are going to use this to steal cars and scam people. It will almost certainly screw up and kill somebody at some point.

No amount of new features will ever convince me to buy a car that does this but the people who do buy them will undoubtedly be poor and marginalized and offered a great deal on their financing if they choose the roborepo car.

I had a different thought - this makes it very appealing to stop selling cars altogether, and only lease or rent them.

This. I anecdotally seen this happen to my wife's friends. Long story short, their credit is shot so they are forced to either purchase car by cash ( they seemingly can't ) or go to one of those places that will give them a car loan at ridiculous rate and installed with gizmos to allow easy repossession once payment is missed.

<< What needs to happen is better consumer protection to prevent americans buying cars on finance that they are never going to be able to afford.

I think you would have everyone and their mother fighting against this saying you need freedom to make stupid decisions. Even I am personally on the fence. You do need better protections, but you need to have an ability to make your choices ( and in US - not having a car is not really a valid solution ).

The solution is probably to work on that very last part

I'd rather a human was involved in the process. With this all you get is "computer says no" and poof your car is gone.

With a human tasked with the repo, at the very least even if "computer says no" to them, they have some leeway (even if it's slim-to-none) in talking to you about it.

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