Fergie's Tech Blog

High-Tech 'Repo Man' Keeps Car Payments Coming

Go Figure -- Miltary Bases as a "first test" site. :-)

A Virginian-Pilot article by Joanne Kimberlin, via USA Today, reports that:

NOTE TO REPO MAN: Might want to look into another line of work.

A new gizmo is upping the odds that even the most hard-knock customer will come up with the car payment. Hooked into the ignition system, the gadget comes in a handful of versions with one common conclusion:

No pay, no start.

It's worked wonders at Norfolk's Patriot Auto Sales, where nearly every car that drives off the lot is outfitted with a PayTeck Smart Box, a system that hands over a five-digit code in exchange for each payment. Come due date, the car won't crank until the customer punches the code into a palm-size keypad wired into the dash.

posted by Fergie @ 11/30/2005 06:57:00 PM