There’s a scene like that in A Canticle for Leibowitz
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I’m getting an “ED-209 demonstration to the Board of Directors” vibe there.
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First thought might be “This is awful and an assault on poor, working people.” - But no. It’s actually a way to make buying a car on credit easier and cheaper for folks with iffy ratings. Repos are expensive. And the longer a car is kept by a buyer who has decided they’re not going to pay, the worse it’s condition is and the lower its resale value will be - hence the greater loss to the lender, which will be passed on to future buyers.
So, this technology is actually good.
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If you think only the Poors will have to deal with this rentier model of car “ownership”, Cory Doctorow wants to enlighten you:
The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve describes the process by which oppressive technology is normalized and distributed through all levels of society. The more privilege someone has, the harder it is to coerce them to use dehumanizing tech, so it starts with marginalized people.
Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest places, and once it’s been normalized a little, we inflict it on students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.
Lather, rinse, repeat: before long, everyone’s been ropted in. If your meals were observed by a remote-monitored CCTV 20 years ago, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a home video surveillance system from Google/Apple/Amazon.
They’ll sell it to you as “convenient” and “easier to use” but you’ll be subject to the same restrictions and potential bugs as the working class person who bought a car on low credit (once the curve reaches you, all the company will put it in all their models).
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Read the Mel Farr story I posted above, he tried it claiming it helped bad risk buyers but he still charged 25% interest.
That doesn’t sound like a good thing.
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Tell me you’ve never been really poor without telling me you’ve never really been poor… 
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Right. Not paying is rarely because you don’t want to. I mean, I saw that as a repo guy (had a successful author say ‘come and get it, if you dare!’) but generally it was “they can’t”. If you have to choose between food and car, or home and car, you choose something else. And then you hide the car at friends, or keep it locked in the garage, or whatever until you can make the payments up, if you can.
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If people want to steal a car, there are far easier ways to do so… And as the cost of housing continues to spiral out of control, especially in urban areas, where jobs are found, the working class is being moved away from public transit, and need their cars even more.
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… imagine, if you can, that we might live in a world where a thing could be good for some people, and bad for other people, at the same time 
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but you could get a cheap used car that might stop working at any moment don’t you want one
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In a marketplace with no or useless lemon laws, isn’t that basically what happens now?
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I’ve said elsewhere that the next generation of hotrodders will start their careers by pithing the brains in their own cars.
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the nearest Debtor’s Prison in order for you to immediately make up the debt… given half a chance, the current crop of christofascists will leap at the chance to turn this country into a Dickensian Dystopia.
Damn! All these years, I’ve been using mere Double rot-13. Now I find out my secrets have been laid bare for who knows how long.
I may never sleep again.
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I think that’s actually an apartment door. The one I recall but can’t find, is a car driving on a highway, autonomously. It then pulls over and locks everyone inside because the police want to talk to them.
I prolly won’t find it before this topic closes though.
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