Another important story from Jessica Silver-Greenberg & Michael Corkery here. I can't do justice to it with a brief excerpt, but see if this makes you want to read the whole piece (which you should):
More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her car loan.
She has no choice. Her auto lender took her to court and won the right to seize a portion of her income to cover her debt. The lender has so far been able to garnish $4,133 from her paychecks — a drain that at one point forced Ms. Harris, a single mother who lives in the Bronx, to go on public assistance to support her two sons.
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A dealership in Queens refused to cancel Theresa Robinson’s loan of nearly $8,000 and give her a refund for a car that broke down days after she drove it off the lot.
Instead, Ms. Robinson, a Staten Island resident who is physically disabled and was desperate for a car to get to her doctors’ appointments, was told to pick a different car from the lot.
The second car she selected — a 2005 Chrysler Pacifica — eventually broke down as well. Unable to afford the loan payments after sinking thousands of dollars into repairs, Ms. Robinson defaulted.
Her subprime lender took her to court and won the right to garnish her income from babysitting her grandson to cover her loan payments.
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“Essentially, the dealers are not selling cars. They are selling bad loans,” said Adam Taub, a lawyer in Detroit who has defended consumers in hundreds of these cases.
