Default rate soars on auto loans in pattern likened to mortgage crisis

The Boston Globe reports:

When lenders sent a tow truck to repossess his silver 2001 Lincoln LS last month, Myles Chilcot eagerly handed over the keys.

Last year, Chilcot, 21, bought the $15,000 car - a sweet ride with tinted windows and custom chrome rims, and a loan with $370 monthly payments that he could not afford on his $12 hourly wage at Home Depot. By the fall, facing mounting credit-card debt, student loans, and rent, he stopped paying the car bills.

"I ran around smiling for 20 minutes when they took the car away," Chilcot said. "It was a relief."

It is also an increasingly common story as more Americans, under growing economic pressure, are deciding to surrender their rides rather than the roofs over their heads: The rate of auto-loan defaults recently reached a 10-year high of 3.4 percent. And one local auction company saw repossessions nearly triple last month compared with a year ago.

As with the subprime-loan crisis that has caused waves of home foreclosures, trouble has been brewing with car loans for years. As the economy boomed, lenders made it easy for shoppers to buy cars they couldn't afford by stretching their loan payments to five or six years, which more than doubled the total of Americans' auto-loan balances over the past decade to $772 billion from $282 billion in 1998. As with home buyers, lenders relaxed standards for car buyers such as Chilcot, who had blemished credit and put no money down.

With oil prices skyrocketing and the economy in a downturn, consumers are looking to downsize to cheaper, more fuel-efficient models, and reduce their payments. And many - even those with good credit and lower interest rates - are finding they can't afford to sell their vehicles because they have more left to pay off than their cars are worth. Lenders, meanwhile, are writing off billions of dollars in defaulted loans, and some analysts worry this could escalate to a foreclosure crisis on wheels.

"The suddenness with which we saw repossessions hit the market at the beginning of the year has been unusual and appears to reflect not only the general economic slowdown, but some spillover from the mortgage crisis," said Tom Kontos, chief economist at Adesa Inc., which runs 58 car auctions across North America. "With folks getting resets on adjustable-rate mortgages, it forces many people to decide whether to default on their home loan or default on their car loan. When they have that kind of choice, predictably, they gravitate toward defaulting on car loan."

Nationwide, repossessions are up about 15 percent so far this year, Kontos said. At North Shore Auto Auction in Ipswich, repossessions almost tripled in February to 125 vehicles, with gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and vans being turned over more quickly than cars at a rate of two to one. As homeowners get squeezed by rising mortgage payments, contractors are also feeling the pinch as people cut back on home-improvement projects, leading to a glut of repossessed pickups, according to Frank Iovanella, president of North Shore Auto Auction.