Stumped by the title? You’re not alone. When i first heard of the term, i remember sitting down at the desk for a good hour, with my head spinning on what had Wall Street come up with this time. Turns out, this wasn’t wall-street, but the car dealer down the street.
Automobile technology in new cars has been increasing at an alarming rate. People are forever being encouraged to trade in their older cars for the newest model of the season. But not everyone has the funds in place for the latest set of wheels on the sales lot. There’s a sizeable chunk of people out there with less than stellar rating. They need cars to be mobile and go about their daily activities. But there are those among them that tend to fall back on their repayment schedule.
Car dealers usually tend to use repossession as a last resort, but it is an expensive affair. Add to it the fact that unscrupulous car owners will go to any lengths to not pay for their car. From repainting them, to hiding them in neighbouring states and everything in between, car owners will try everything. Dealers have long been bleeding on account of this, with losses piling up in recent years, as they began wooing people with less than ideal credit rating to buy cars from them.
As is wont to happen, they turned to technology. With GPS enabled tracking devices becoming cheaper and easier to install on cars, dealers have increasingly taken to having them on cars sold to people who are likely to default on their payments. This is being termed as financial gps in cars.
Many of these GPS tracking devices also come with an add-on function that disables the car, thereby preventing it from being used any further, till the payment due has been cleared off by the owner. A fair act according to some. But there are others who are starting to speak out against the installation of financial gps in cars.
People are pointing to instances where dealers have disabled vehicles when the owners have truly needed them. Cars have been disabled on hospital runs, at stop signs, in city traffic and even when motoring along on the freeways. The safety implications of such actions do not need to be explained further to be understood according to experts. Terming the behaviour as irresponsible and potentially life endangering, they have called for such reckless exploitation of automobile technology in new cars.
