[TXCSSU]

Originally Posted by FarmerFran

The 0% is only for well qualified buyers.

Correct, but if GM is offering it only for 48 months, and Chrysler is offering for 72 months, then that should give you an idea of where they line up. I suspect that Chrysler will allow a lower "sub-prime" rating as an entry level, while GM may not allow a lower credit rate. On the flip side, Chrysler credit may figure that the Challenger/Charger are easier to sell at auction, and are ok with lending to sub prime lenders in the event of repossession.

Out of all the reviews that I'm seeing, I have yet to see any review give the Charger/Challenger the nod over its rivals. They all seem to acknowledge that in top trim, the Charger/Challenger does win in a straight line, but in other driving dynamics, comes up short. I guess if you are only concerned with straight line performance and bragging rights at the bar, the Charger/Challenger are for you. I personally like the whole package when it comes to driving, which is why I chose the Camaro. There's really no wrong choice out of the 3, which is the beauty of competition, each brand makes a compelling argument as to why you should choose them over their rivals.

[MightyBobo]

People don't buy the Charger or Challenger for it's driving dynamics, that's for sure lol.

[FarmerFran]

Originally Posted by TXCSSU

Correct, but if GM is offering it only for 48 months, and Chrysler is offering for 72 months, then that should give you an idea of where they line up. I suspect that Chrysler will allow a lower "sub-prime" rating as an entry level, while GM may not allow a lower credit rate. On the flip side, Chrysler credit may figure that the Challenger/Charger are easier to sell at auction, and are ok with lending to sub prime lenders in the event of repossession.

Out of all the reviews that I'm seeing, I have yet to see any review give the Charger/Challenger the nod over its rivals. They all seem to acknowledge that in top trim, the Charger/Challenger does win in a straight line, but in other driving dynamics, comes up short. I guess if you are only concerned with straight line performance and bragging rights at the bar, the Charger/Challenger are for you. I personally like the whole package when it comes to driving, which is why I chose the Camaro. There's really no wrong choice out of the 3, which is the beauty of competition, each brand makes a compelling argument as to why you should choose them over their rivals.

Actually it is easier to get GM 0% than Chrysler Capitol.

[hotlap]

FCA helps drive subprime lending machine
Gabrielle CoppolaBloomberg News
July 18, 2017

It’s classic subprime: hasty loans, rapid defaults, and, at times, outright fraud.

....

Few things capture this phenomenon like the partnership between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Banco Santander SA. Since 2013, as U.S. car sales soared, the two have built one of the industry’s most powerful subprime machines.

Details of that relationship, pieced together from court documents, regulatory filings and interviews with industry insiders, lay bare some of the excesses of today’s subprime auto boom. Wall Street has rewarded lax lending standards that let people get loans without verifying incomes or job histories. For instance, Santander recently vetted incomes on fewer than 1 out of every 10 loans packaged into $1 billion of bonds, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The largest portion were for Fiat Chrysler vehicles.

Some of their dealers, meantime, gamed the process so low-income borrowers could drive off in new cars, prosecutors said in court documents.

Through it all, Wall Street’s appetite for high-yield investments has kept the loans — and the bonds — coming. Santander says it has cut ties with hundreds of dealerships pushing unsound loans, some of which defaulted as soon as the first payment. At the same time, Santander plans to increase control over its U.S. subprime auto unit, Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc., people familiar with the matter said.

Santander, subpoenaed or questioned by a group of about 30 states regarding its auto loan underwriting and securitization activities, declined to comment on “active legal matters.” In May, Santander agreed to pay $26 million to settle allegations brought by Delaware and Massachusetts as part of ongoing investigations into the auto industry’s lending practices. Santander, whose partnership with Fiat Chrysler goes by the Chrysler Capital brand name, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

Reid Bigland, Fiat Chrysler’s U.S. sales chief, said Santander has been a “good partner.”

In recent years, lending practices in the subprime auto industry have come under scrutiny. Regulators and consumer advocates say it takes advantage of people with nowhere else to turn.

For investors, the allure of subprime car loans is clear: Securities composed of such debt can offer yields as high as 5 percent. In a world of ultra-low rates, that’s more than triple the comparable yield for Treasuries. Of course, the market is still much smaller than the subprime-mortgage market which triggered the credit crisis, making a repeat unlikely. But the question now is whether that premium, which has dwindled as demand soared, is worth it.

Cracks emerge

Asset-backed securities based on auto loans are engineered to keep paying even when some loans sour. Still, some cracks have emerged in the $1.2 trillion market for auto financing. Delinquencies have picked up, as have losses on subprime loans. Auto loan fraud, meantime, is approaching levels seen in mortgages during the bubble.

Auto finance “is not going to bring down the financial system like the mortgage crisis almost did, but it does signal more stress with the consumer,” said Stephen Caprio, a credit strategist at UBS Group AG.

The Chrysler-Santander relationship opens a rare window into the industry.

In the years after its 2009 bankruptcy, Fiat Chrysler looked for a dedicated lender to help customers finance cars quickly. One reason it picked Santander was the Spanish lender’s expertise in “automated decisioning.” At the time, a Fiat Chrysler executive said the process helped Santander “take a little bit more risk and approve more deals because they mine the data” in subprime.

Becoming the carmaker’s preferred lender made sense for Santander. It was aggressively expanding in the U.S. subprime loan market, and Chrysler relied more on buyers with lower credit scores than General Motors Co. or Ford Motor Co.

Problems surfaced almost from the start. Many of them, detailed in the settlement between Santander and authorities in Delaware and Massachusetts, recall some of the excesses of the subprime housing era.

Attorneys general in both states alleged Santander enabled a group of “fraud dealers” to put buyers into cars they couldn’t afford, with loans it knew they couldn’t repay. It offloaded most of the debt, which often had rates over 15 percent, reselling them to yield-hungry ABS investors.

State authorities also said an internal Santander review in 2013 found that 10 out of 11 loan applications from a Massachusetts dealer contained inflated or unverifiable incomes. (It’s not clear whether this particular case involved a Fiat Chrysler dealer.)

Santander kept originating the dealer’s loans anyway, even as they continued to default “at a high rate,” the authorities said.

While Santander takes pains to avoid criticizing Fiat Chrysler, the lender launched a special loyalty and rewards program to vet the carmaker’s dealerships. Those that aren’t deemed fraudulent are labeled “VIPs.” Santander has cut ties with over 800 dealers since 2015 as it tries to boost business without exposing itself to more bad loans.

Fiat Chrysler declined to comment on fraud at its dealer network.

Varying norms

Indeed, with U.S. auto sales falling after a record 2016, many lenders including Santander say they’re tightening standards. Santander’s underwriting practices, however, continue to raise eyebrows. In May, Moody’s said Santander verified incomes on only 8 percent of its loans bundled into bonds.

Yet when it comes to due diligence, there’s no industrywide standard. Unlike the mortgage market, stated-income loans — or “liar loans” — are perfectly legal in car buying. Last month, Jeff Brown, Ally Financial Inc.’s chief executive, said verifying income isn’t the norm. Ally, he said, checked incomes on 65 percent of subprime car loans. GM Financial’s AmeriCredit unit checked roughly the same percentage.

The industry has little reason to change given the success of Wall Street’s securitization machine. Protections built into the bonds have largely insulated investors from losses.

The losers, of course, are people who go into debt for cars they can’t afford.

Jerry Robinson, who worked in Santander’s debt collection unit, has seen trouble firsthand.

Often, he found dealers listed non-existent features like sunroofs to inflate a car’s value and win credit approval. Although Robinson’s job was to make sure dealers reimbursed Santander for loan fraud, borrowers didn’t see their debts reduced. Instead, their loans were usually extended, increasing the compound interest consumers would ultimately pay after their repoed cars were reinstated. More often than not, those payments wind up going to ABS investors.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/bu...ine/103815928/

[FarmerFran]

Ok, maybe not 5 years ago.

[rocket403]

Hotlap anything from say the last couple of years LOL


Nothing like that is happening north of the border, the hoops that you have to jump through, there is no getting around.

[hotlap]

Originally Posted by rocket403

Hotlap anything from say the last couple of years LOL


Nothing like that is happening north of the border, the hoops that you have to jump through, there is no getting around.

The settlement covers loans through 2019. LOL(?)

$550M Santander Car Loan Class Action Website Is Active

Santander auto loans between Jan. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2019

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-...ite-is-active/

[zxspeedspec]

https://www.carsdirect.com/deals-art...ith-bad-credit

Seems pretty straightforward. While both Dodge and GM will finance subprime loans, GM limits their subprime loans to entry level vehicles. Dodge will subprime finance a ****ing Hellcat.

If we wanted we could probably extrapolate something based off the marketing and key demographics each manufacturer targets. Ignoring the looks of the Chargers/Challengers/Camaro/Mustang and going purely off of the objectively measurable aspects, it's easy to see that Chargers/Challengers cater to an ignorant market base. With the exception of straight line speed (the easiest and cheapest to modify for aftermarket), Chargers/Challengers don't win in any other performance metric. It's essentially a 2005 chassis with a modern engine shoved into it. Can't even qualify it as a modern transmission because it doesn't offer anything modern. It's pretty easy to see if your entire marketing strategy is to capitalize on ignorant customers by manipulating their emotions over how the vehicle looks on the outside, you're going to end up with an objectively worse group of buyers.

Hell, I'm willing to bet there's more people who own Challengers/Chargers who couldn't care less about anything performance related about their car but it "looks good". How many Camaro owners can you say have that same mindset? I've dated a stripper who was definitely that way, but other than that most Camaro owners I've ran into know exactly what they have, what performance reasons drove them to buy it, and why they chose it out of the 3 options available to them.

The Charger/Challenger is essentially a poverty man's Corvette. Ghetto status symbol vs suburban status symbol.

[hotlap]

Originally Posted by zxspeedspec

https://www.carsdirect.com/deals-art...ith-bad-credit

Seems pretty straightforward. While both Dodge and GM will finance subprime loans, GM limits their subprime loans to entry level vehicles. Dodge will subprime finance a ****ing Hellcat.

If we wanted we could probably extrapolate something based off the marketing and key demographics each manufacturer targets. Ignoring the looks of the Chargers/Challengers/Camaro/Mustang and going purely off of the objectively measurable aspects, it's easy to see that Chargers/Challengers cater to an ignorant market base. With the exception of straight line speed (the easiest and cheapest to modify for aftermarket), Chargers/Challengers don't win in any other performance metric. It's essentially a 2005 chassis with a modern engine shoved into it. Can't even qualify it as a modern transmission because it doesn't offer anything modern. It's pretty easy to see if your entire marketing strategy is to capitalize on ignorant customers by manipulating their emotions over how the vehicle looks on the outside, you're going to end up with an objectively worse group of buyers.

Hell, I'm willing to bet there's more people who own Challengers/Chargers who couldn't care less about anything performance related about their car but it "looks good". How many Camaro owners can you say have that same mindset? I've dated a stripper who was definitely that way, but other than that most Camaro owners I've ran into know exactly what they have, what performance reasons drove them to buy it, and why they chose it out of the 3 options available to them.

The Charger/Challenger is essentially a poverty man's Corvette. Ghetto status symbol vs suburban status symbol.

This sums it up. Interesting read

Becoming Chrysler's preferred lender made sense for Santander. It was aggressively expanding in the U.S. subprime loan market, and Chrysler, the perennial third wheel among the "Big Three," relied more on buyers with lower credit scores than General Motors Co. or Ford Motor Co.

https://www.autonews.com/article/201...dy-in-subprime

[AZCamaroFan]

challenger came in first, by 500 cars, for the first time in it's history during a chip shortage. I'm not wondering why.

[zxspeedspec]

Originally Posted by AZCamaroFan

challenger came in first, by 500 cars, for the first time in it's history during a chip shortage. I'm not wondering why.

You don't need modern chips when your entire platform is running off of the same chip that powered the 2004 Motorola Razr

[UnknownJinX]

Originally Posted by zxspeedspec

https://www.carsdirect.com/deals-art...ith-bad-credit

Seems pretty straightforward. While both Dodge and GM will finance subprime loans, GM limits their subprime loans to entry level vehicles. Dodge will subprime finance a ****ing Hellcat.

If we wanted we could probably extrapolate something based off the marketing and key demographics each manufacturer targets. Ignoring the looks of the Chargers/Challengers/Camaro/Mustang and going purely off of the objectively measurable aspects, it's easy to see that Chargers/Challengers cater to an ignorant market base. With the exception of straight line speed (the easiest and cheapest to modify for aftermarket), Chargers/Challengers don't win in any other performance metric. It's essentially a 2005 chassis with a modern engine shoved into it. Can't even qualify it as a modern transmission because it doesn't offer anything modern. It's pretty easy to see if your entire marketing strategy is to capitalize on ignorant customers by manipulating their emotions over how the vehicle looks on the outside, you're going to end up with an objectively worse group of buyers.

Hell, I'm willing to bet there's more people who own Challengers/Chargers who couldn't care less about anything performance related about their car but it "looks good". How many Camaro owners can you say have that same mindset? I've dated a stripper who was definitely that way, but other than that most Camaro owners I've ran into know exactly what they have, what performance reasons drove them to buy it, and why they chose it out of the 3 options available to them.

The Charger/Challenger is essentially a poverty man's Corvette. Ghetto status symbol vs suburban status symbol.

I dunno, most average car buyers are not super informed, anyway.

I really liked Challengers in the past and wanted one, but I just couldn't see myself doing it anymore after owning an RX-8. Handling matters to me.

That said, there are people who know exactly what they are getting with a Challenger and they are okay with that. They specifically want a boaty car with a big V8. Nothing wrong with that.

Challenger's and Charger's chassis may be a rehashed old Mercedes E-Class chassis, but their superchargers are also better than what Ford and GM use on GT500 and ZL1. Twin screw is better in every way than Roots except for cost.

Also, realize that Mustang is the one that has the reputation of crashing into crowds at C&C, not Challenger/Charger. Every car crowd has a negative stereotype if you look hard enough.

[zxspeedspec]

Originally Posted by UnknownJinX

Challenger's and Charger's chassis may be a rehashed old Mercedes E-Class chassis, but their superchargers are also better than what Ford and GM use on GT500 and ZL1. Twin screw is better in every way than Roots except for cost.

Also, realize that Mustang is the one that has the reputation of crashing into crowds at C&C, not Challenger/Charger. Every car crowd has a negative stereotype if you look hard enough.

The supercharger is a relatively cheap fix. For less than $10k you can swap over to a Maggie 2650R. To fix the Charger/Challenger? How much does it cost to strip that car down to the chassis, acid dip the chassis to reduce the weight, realize it's pointless, and then ask McLaren to build you a bespoke carbon fiber tub chassis instead? Then after all that you still need to source $4k worth of suspension, $5k worth of lighter wheels, and put the shitbox back together.

I'd rather be known for driving into crowds than only capable of going in a straight line in a 20 year old MB.

[FarmerFran]

Originally Posted by zxspeedspec

The supercharger is a relatively cheap fix. For less than $10k you can swap over to a Maggie 2650R. To fix the Charger/Challenger? How much does it cost to strip that car down to the chassis, acid dip the chassis to reduce the weight, realize it's pointless, and then ask McLaren to build you a bespoke carbon fiber tub chassis instead? Then after all that you still need to source $4k worth of suspension, $5k worth of lighter wheels, and put the shitbox back together.

I'd rather be known for driving into crowds than only capable of going in a straight line in a 20 year old MB.

Post up some of your lap times, very interested. Seriously.