Repossession Services (U.S.) — NAICS 561491

1. Overview

Repossession services are the businesses lenders hire to physically recover collateral — overwhelmingly cars and light trucks, but also boats, RVs, motorcycles, farm and construction equipment, aircraft, and even furniture and appliances — when a borrower stops paying [5]. It is a small, unglamorous, deeply fragmented service industry that sits at the tail end of the roughly $1.7-trillion U.S. auto-lending machine: when consumer credit sours, this is the industry that turns a delinquent loan back into a sellable asset. Repossession firms usually do not own the loans or the vehicles — they earn service fees, while the lender keeps the credit risk and the auction-price risk.

Why it matters beyond the industry itself: repossession volume is one of the cleanest real-world barometers of household financial stress, and it is broadly countercyclical to consumer credit health — it rises when delinquencies rise. An estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed in the U.S. in 2024, the most since the Great Recession and up roughly 43% in two years [6]. That surge is a demand signal for the whole recover-and-remarket chain.

The honest catch for investors is that there is no pure-play public repossession company. The street-level work is done by thousands of small, mostly owner-operated agencies. Public-market exposure is indirect — through the auction and data infrastructure that sits above the repo agent, and through the auto lenders whose credit losses drive the volume. The concentrated money and the ownership consolidation are happening in the private and private-equity layer.

2. What it is and how it's structured

NAICS 561491 covers establishments primarily engaged in repossessing tangible property (e.g., automobiles) for creditors [5]. The core deliverable is location plus recovery. A typical workflow runs:

default or voluntary surrender → assignment → skip-tracing and asset location → recovery → storage and documentation → redemption or auction → title and proceeds handling.

The chain has three distinct layers, and it matters which one you are looking at:

• Recovery agencies ("repo agents") — the boots-on-the-ground operators with tow trucks, storage lots, licenses, and surety bonds. This is what 561491 mostly counts: highly local, highly fragmented.
• Forwarders (national repossession-management companies) — asset-light middlemen that sit between the lender and hundreds of local agencies. National lenders increasingly outsource the whole recovery workflow to a forwarder, which assigns each account to a local agency, manages compliance and technology, and keeps a spread [20][26][27]. Examples: PAR North America (part of OPENLANE), American Recovery Service, Primeritus Financial Services, Resolvion, National Asset Recovery Specialists.
• Data, software, and remarketing infrastructure — license-plate-recognition (LPR) camera networks and skip-tracing databases that tell agents where a car is, the workflow software that routes assignments, and the wholesale/salvage auctions that resell the recovered vehicle.

What it excludes (adjacent NAICS to name): the lending itself (sales-finance and consumer lending, NAICS 522xxx); pure towing with no recovery mandate (Motor Vehicle Towing, 488410); debt collection by phone or letter (Collection Agencies, 561440); debt-buying (purchasing receivables rather than recovering physical collateral); credit reporting (561450); standalone investigation / skip-tracing (Investigation Services, 561611); and downstream auto auctions and remarketing. Real-estate foreclosure is a separate legal process entirely and is out of scope.

Ownership is predominantly small private firms and sole-proprietor owner-operators. The federal data show many firms but no breakdown by family, corporate, or private-equity ownership. The forwarder tier has attracted private-equity roll-ups (e.g., Primeritus under Kinderhook Industries) [30]; the LPR-data tier sits inside a large public company (Motorola Solutions) [24].

3. How big it is

Our federal ground-truth figures for NAICS 561491 (note: employer statistics are 2023; receipts and concentration are 2022):

At a $19-million receipts threshold, essentially every firm in this industry qualifies as a small business [3].

The undercount caveat is large and central here. Those federal numbers count only employer establishments. A big share of actual repossession work is done by nonemployer owner-operators — one person, one tow truck, a license and a bond — who do not appear in County Business Patterns employer counts [1][4]. Private industry estimates put the number of U.S. repossession businesses at roughly 10,000-plus once nonemployers are included, versus the ~670 employer establishments in the federal data [19]. On top of that, chunks of the "repo economy" get booked in adjacent codes — towing (488410), collection (561440), skip-tracing (561611) — and in the forwarder and LPR-data businesses, which classify elsewhere. So the true economic footprint of vehicle recovery is materially larger than $1.1 billion; that receipts figure is best read as the narrow employer "recovery-agency" slice, not the whole ecosystem. The federal file does not provide nonemployer receipts, repossession volume, average fees, or profit margins — so those are not stated here.

Concentration is low, consistent with a fragmented industry: the top 4 firms earn 24.3% of receipts, the top 8 earn 33.2%, the top 20 earn 45.2%, and the top 50 earn 60.6% [2]. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — a standard concentration measure that squares and sums each firm's market share — is just 207.7, far below the 1,000-to-1,800 range that the U.S. antitrust agencies treat as the boundary of an unconcentrated market [2][17].

4. The investable universe

There is no publicly traded pure-play repossession company, and there likely never will be — the street-level business is too small, local, and low-margin to scale into a public equity. Public exposure is sideways, through the infrastructure above the repo agent and the auto lenders below it. (Tickers and scale below are only to locate the public proxies; none is a repossession pure-play.)

Major private platforms and owners of the actual value chain:

• Forwarders / recovery managers: PAR North America (OPENLANE) [20]; Primeritus Financial Services (Kinderhook Industries private equity) [30]; American Recovery Service (ARS), a Patrick K. Willis Company, which contracts with licensed local agents rather than repossessing itself [26]; Resolvion, a national repossession-management company (a 2019 merger involved Spanos Barber Jesse & Co. and TZP Group's Del Mar Recovery Solutions) [27]; and National Asset Recovery Specialists (NARS), focused on vehicles, boats, aircraft, and equipment [28].
• Data/software: DRN (LPR cameras/data) inside Motorola Solutions [24]; RDN (repo workflow) inside OPENLANE [20].
• Auction/remarketing: Manheim (part of Cox Automotive / Cox Enterprises, privately held) is, with Copart and IAA, where recovered vehicles are resold [29].
• The agencies themselves: thousands of small private and family-owned firms; the main trade group is the American Recovery Association (ARA) [31].

The U.S. vehicle-auction market that recovered cars feed into was valued at roughly $3.47 billion in 2024, projected to reach about $4.48 billion by 2030 — a useful proxy for the resale channel downstream of repossession [32].

5. How the money works

The economics are unit-based, contingent, and thin — closer to a logistics/contracting business than to finance.

Recovery agencies are paid mostly a flat recovery fee per successfully recovered vehicle, historically in the $200–$500 range, and typically only on success ("no recovery, no fee") [18]. Revenue equals assignment volume × close (recovery) rate × fee, plus ancillary charges — daily storage fees ($20–$50/day is common), transport/mileage, key cutting, condition reports, personal-property handling, and skip-tracing [18]. The cost stack is heavy and rising: tow trucks and fuel, commercial insurance (climbing fast), licensing and surety bonds, compliance, storage-lot real estate, technology/LPR subscriptions, and labor for a physically dangerous job. The structural squeeze is that the flat fee has barely moved in decades in nominal terms, so real revenue per unit has fallen while costs rose [18].

Forwarders make money on the spread — asset-light logistics and compliance margin. A lender may pay the forwarder on the order of ~$500 per recovery while the forwarder pays the local agency ~$275–$350, keeping the difference for locating the asset, routing the work, and standing behind compliance [18]. Their edge is scale, national coverage, technology, and a single point of accountability for the lender.

The data layer (DRN/LPR) is the highest-margin, most defensible economics in the chain: recurring data subscriptions plus per-hit fees. Camera-equipped "scout" cars continuously scan license plates and build a time-and-place database; when a wanted vehicle is spotted, that "hit" is monetized. DRN is reported to facilitate 80%+ of LPR-assisted recoveries [25].

Key operating levers and the metrics that track them: recovery/close rate and time to recovery (LPR and skip-tracing raise the odds and speed of finding a car — the difference between getting paid and not); cost per successful recovery; storage days and transport cost; redemption rate and net auction proceeds; damage claims, complaints, and compliance exceptions; client concentration and vendor retention; and capacity utilization of trucks, agents, and lot space. Volume itself is driven almost entirely by borrower delinquency, which the industry does not control.

Critically, higher repossession volume does not automatically mean higher profit. Difficult skips, lower fee schedules, labor shortages, and rising insurance or fuel costs can more than offset volume growth. And cyclicality is not a simple "recession = boom": volume tracks delinquency, but severe crises can trigger moratoria and forbearance that temporarily suppress repossessions (as in 2020), followed by a catch-up surge when protections lapse.

6. Demand drivers

The primary driver is the number of secured consumer and commercial loans entering default.

• Auto-loan delinquency and default. The single biggest driver. Cox Automotive put the 2024 default rate at 3.13%, the highest since 2011, with an estimated ~1.73 million repossessions and a repossession rate near 2.3% [6]. U.S. auto-loan balances reached $1.69 trillion in Q1 2026 per the New York Federal Reserve, though it noted transitions into early delinquency were roughly steady [8].
• Vehicle-affordability stress. Record vehicle prices, high interest rates, higher insurance, and widespread negative equity have pushed even prime and near-prime borrowers into distress; subprime 60-day delinquency hit a record 6.6% in early 2025 [7].
• Loan mix and lender risk appetite. More subprime and longer-term originations mean more future recoveries.
• Used-vehicle values. Higher resale values make lenders more willing to repossess (better net recovery) and shrink deficiency balances; falling values do the reverse.
• Regulatory/forbearance environment. Payment moratoria suppress volume; their expiration releases it.
• Commercial and equipment cycles. Freight recessions, farm-income swings, and equipment-, boat-, aircraft-, and powersports-finance stress drive non-auto recoveries.
• Lender outsourcing and technology. Growing use of forwarders, LPR, skip-tracing, and workflow software shifts where the margin sits within the chain.

A note on the data: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB — the federal consumer-finance regulator) itself observes that comprehensive national repossession-volume data are limited [9]. Third-party repo-volume estimates (like the 1.73M figure) are useful directional signals but should not be treated as equivalent to federal industry revenue.

7. Regulation

Repossession is legally sensitive because the provider takes possession of property belonging to a borrower or lessee. It is governed by a patchwork of state law over a federal-commercial-law backbone, plus consumer-protection oversight.

• UCC Article 9, §9-609 — "self-help" repossession. Under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC — the model commercial statute adopted by the states), a secured lender may retake collateral after default without a court order, provided it does not "breach the peace" [12]. Courts draw fairly consistent lines: no force or threats, no breaking into a closed garage or through a locked gate, and the agent must stop and leave the moment the owner objects [12][13]. The subsequent sale must be commercially reasonable, and state law may require notices, redemption rights, personal-property procedures, and deficiency calculations [12]. Crucially, the lender's duty to repossess peaceably is non-delegable — the lender remains liable for a breach committed by its independent contractor, which is why lenders and forwarders police agent conduct so heavily [13].
• State licensing and bonding. Many states license repossession agencies and individual recovery agents, with bonding, storage-lot, and insurance requirements that vary widely. California, for example, requires agency licensing, a qualified manager, employee registration, and background checks under its Collateral Recovery Act [15]. The ARA maintains a state-by-state requirements reference [31].
• Federal debt-collection and consumer-protection law. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) applies to third-party debt collectors and reaches certain nonjudicial enforcement of security interests; a firm that also collects a deficiency balance may take on added debt-collection obligations [14]. The CFPB can hold lenders and servicers accountable for unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAP) connected with repossession, including failures by their vendors [10][11]. Its Bulletin 2022-04 warned against wrongful repossessions — taking a car after the borrower paid or received a deferment, or without a valid lien — and flagged charging borrowers upfront fees to retrieve personal property as an unfair practice [10]. CFPB examination procedures specifically review cancellation of repo orders, vendor oversight, borrower communications, bankruptcy accounts, and auction proceeds [11], and a January 2025 CFPB report examined repossession practices industry-wide [9]. (The CFPB's enforcement posture has shifted under the current administration, but state attorneys general and Congress continue to press the issue — see §10.)
• Servicemember protections. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) requires a court order to repossess an active-duty servicemember's vehicle.
• Electronic immobilization ("kill switch" / starter-interrupt) devices. Some states regulate GPS/starter-interrupt devices that let a lender disable a car remotely for missed payments — requiring disclosure, grace periods, or emergency override codes; consumer advocates (National Consumer Law Center, NCLC) have published model principles [16].

For any operator, compliance quality is both a competitive asset and a material liability. A single wrongful recovery can trigger litigation, restitution, statutory and punitive damages, regulatory penalties, insurance claims, loss of the deficiency claim, and loss of lender relationships.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining feature is a barbell: extreme fragmentation at the bottom, tight concentration at the chokepoints.

• At the agency level: thousands of small operators, low concentration (CR4 24.3%, HHI 207.7) [2], and little pricing power — flat fees are largely dictated by lenders and forwarders. Competition turns less on brand than on geographic coverage, recovery speed and success rate, vendor density, lender-system integrations, compliance documentation, asset-location data, and the ability to manage exceptions and consumer complaints.
• At the forwarder level: a handful of national players, several private-equity-backed, that aggregate demand and increasingly disintermediate the direct lender-agent relationship [20][30].
• At the data level: near-monopoly. Motorola/DRN's LPR network is the industry's must-have locating tool and a genuine competitive moat, with reported 80%+ share of LPR-assisted recoveries [25].

The structural story of the last decade is agency attrition. An estimated ~30% of repossession companies closed during the pandemic, and several states shed licensed agents [19]. The cause is the fee squeeze from §5: stagnant flat fees against rising insurance, compliance, and technology costs. That has three consequences: (1) a genuine capacity shortage — lenders sometimes cannot find an agent to recover a car even when volume is high; (2) value migrating upward to forwarders and data providers who capture margin without owning trucks; and (3) ongoing consolidation opportunity in the forwarder, software, compliance, and multi-branch-agency tiers. Roll-ups are easier there than among local field agencies, where state licensing, insurance, local relationships, and agent retention make integration genuinely hard.

9. Risks

• Legal and regulatory risk. Breach of the peace, wrongful repossession, improper fees, mishandled personal property, bankruptcy-stay violations, and inaccurate notices carry statutory and punitive damages and can void a lender's deficiency claim [10][12]. Political scrutiny is rising (see §10).
• Fee compression + cost inflation. Stagnant flat fees against rising fuel, insurance, labor, truck, storage, and compliance costs keep squeezing agencies out.
• Supply/capacity risk. A shrinking agent base can cap recoveries even when demand is high.
• Customer concentration. Losing one large lender can be existential for a small agency.
• Cyclical + policy-driven demand. Volume can swing sharply and be suppressed overnight by moratoria/forbearance; more assignments do not guarantee more profit.
• Privacy / surveillance backlash. The LPR data model — billions of time-stamped location records gathered from ordinary drivers — draws civil-liberties, antitrust, and data-privacy attention that could constrain the highest-margin part of the chain [25].
• Concentration risk in the data layer. Heavy dependence on a single dominant LPR network is a systemic and regulatory pressure point.
• Auction and vehicle-value risk. Operators with remarketing exposure suffer from falling used-vehicle prices, transport delays, or title problems.
• Safety and reputation risk. Repossession is physically dangerous and politically unpopular; incidents damage lenders and vendors alike.
• Statistical risk. Employer-only federal data materially understate the private, contractor-heavy portion of the market — a hazard for anyone sizing it.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes (all indirect).

• Infrastructure over agents. The cleanest direct listed exposure is OPENLANE (OPLN) — but read it as a consolidated wholesale-auction, dealer-finance, technology, and logistics company, not a pure-play repossession valuation; recovery is one thread [20]. The other durable economics sit in the data/logistics layer — Motorola Solutions (MSI) via DRN/LPR — and in the remarketing/auction venues where recovered cars are resold: Copart (CPRT), RB Global/IAA (RBA), and ACV Auctions (ACVA) [32]. These benefit from recovered-vehicle volume without carrying the repo agent's thin margins or headline risk.
• The lender flip side. Subprime and mass-market auto lenders — Credit Acceptance (CACC), Consumer Portfolio Services (CPSS), Ally Financial (ALLY) — are the demand engine, but rising repossession volume is a symptom of their credit losses [21][22][23]. It is a credit-quality warning on their loan books, not a revenue driver, so investors watch repo trends as a risk indicator rather than a bullish tell.

Private routes.

• Private equity is the natural home. The scalable value is in forwarders, workflow/compliance software, and multi-branch agency roll-ups (Kinderhook/Primeritus is the template) [30]. The most attractive targets combine local execution with national coverage and pair it with diversified lender contracts, high compliant recovery rates, low damage/complaint rates, strong agent retention, integrated software and audit trails, limited customer concentration, and surge-ready storage/transport capacity. Single owner-operator agencies are small, local, low-margin, and hard to scale — a lifestyle business more than an investment.

Reported backdrop. Auto-loan balances are large ($1.69T, Q1 2026) and delinquency is elevated but its recent transitions have been roughly steady, and comprehensive federal repo-volume data remain limited [8][9].

Judgment. The demand backdrop is unusually strong — record repossession volumes in 2024, subprime and even some prime delinquencies at multi-decade highs [6][7]. That supports the whole recover-and-remarket chain. But three counterweights temper the story: (1) the persistent agent-capacity shortage and fee compression cap agency profitability even in a boom; (2) value keeps migrating to forwarders and LPR data, not to the people doing the work; and (3) political and regulatory risk is intensifying — a U.S. Senate probe into surging car repossessions was launched in early 2026 [33], and privacy scrutiny of LPR is building. Net: the near-term outlook is cautiously constructive for recovery demand but mixed for margins — and the tradeable exposure sits in the data and remarketing infrastructure, and in reading lender credit quality, not in the fragmented, margin-starved repo-agency business that NAICS 561491 actually measures. The best operators will be the ones that cut the lender's total cost per compliant recovery, not simply those that recover the most vehicles.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 561491 (Repossession Services) — establishments, employment, annual payroll, Q1 payroll. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 561491 — receipts, firm count, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN?codeset=naics~561491&y=2022
3. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 561491, $19M receipts). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. U.S. Census Bureau. Nonemployer Statistics. https://www.census.gov/econ/overview/mu0500.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 NAICS Definition — 561491 Repossession Services. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=561491&year=2022
6. Carscoops / Bloomberg (Cox Automotive data). "Car Repossessions Return To Great Recession Levels" (~1.73M repossessed in 2024; 3.13% default rate). 2025. https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/car-repossessions-return-to-great-recession-levels-just-in-time-for-another-one/
7. CURepossession / Carscoops (TransUnion & Cox Automotive forecasts). "TransUnion and Cox Auto 2025 Repossession Forecasts" (record 6.6% subprime 60-day delinquency; 2025 projections). 2025. https://curepossession.com/trans-union-and-cox-auto-2025-repossession-forecasts/
8. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit: Q1 2026 ($1.69T auto balances; delinquency transitions). 2026. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
9. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Repossession in Auto Finance (report; limited national volume data). January 2025. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/repossession-in-auto-finance/
10. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Bulletin 2022-04: Mitigating Harm From Repossession of Automobiles. 2022. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/supervisory-guidance/cfpb-bulletin-2022-04-mitigating-harm-from-repossession-of-automobiles/
11. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Automobile Finance Examination Procedures. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/supervision-examinations/automobile-finance-examination-procedures/
12. Legal Information Institute (Cornell). UCC § 9-609: Secured Party's Right to Take Possession After Default. https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/9/9-609
13. Clanton Law Office / NYU Journal of Law & Business. "How Self-Help Car Repossession Works" and "The Uncertain Scope of the Breach of Peace Clause Under UCC Article 9" (non-delegable duty). 2023–2024. https://www.clantonlawoffice.com/wrongful-repossession/
14. Legal Information Institute (Cornell). Fair Debt Collection Practices Act — 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692a, 1692f. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1692a
15. California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. Repossession Agency, Qualified Manager, and Employee (Collateral Recovery Act licensing). https://www.bsis.ca.gov/forms_pubs/repo_fact.shtml
16. National Consumer Law Center. Principles for Laws Permitting Electronic Repossession of Vehicles (starter-interrupt/GPS device regulation). 2022. https://www.nclc.org/resources/principles-for-laws-permitting-electronic-repossession-of-vehicles/
17. U.S. Department of Justice & Federal Trade Commission. 2023 Merger Guidelines (HHI concentration thresholds). 2023. https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines
18. First Quarter Finance / CURepossession. "How Much Are Repossession Fees?" and "The $500 Repo Fee" (flat fees $200–$500; forwarder spread; storage $20–$50/day). 2023–2025. https://firstquarterfinance.com/how-much-are-repossession-fees/
19. Marketplace (APM) / American Recovery Association advisories. "A good repo man is hard to find" (agent shortage; ~30% of firms closed in pandemic; ~10,000–11,000 firms incl. nonemployers). 2023. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/07/repo-man-shortage
20. OPENLANE, Inc. Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2025 (PAR North America; Recovery Database Network, RDN). 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1395942/000139594226000006/opln-20251231.htm
21. Credit Acceptance Corporation. Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2025. 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/885550/000088555026000047/cacc-20251231.htm
22. Consumer Portfolio Services, Inc. Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2025. 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/889609/000168316826001856/cps_i10k-123125.htm
23. Ally Financial Inc. Form 10-K for the Year Ended December 31, 2025. 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/40729/000004072926000005/ally-20251231.htm
24. TechCrunch / Auto Remarketing. "Motorola Solutions acquires VaaS (makers of automated license-plate readers, incl. DRN and Vigilant) for $445M." 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-makers-of-automated-license-plate-readers-for-445m/
25. Resolvion / CURepossession. "Unraveling the Confusion Around LPR" and DRN market-share commentary (80%+ of LPR-assisted recoveries). 2023–2024. https://resolvion.com/unraveling-the-confusion-around-lpr/
26. American Recovery Service (a Patrick K. Willis Company). Company Overview. https://americanrecoveryservice.com/
27. TZP Group / press release. "SBJ Merges ALS Resolvion with TZP's Del Mar Recovery Solutions." 2019. https://www.tzpgroup.com/
28. National Asset Recovery Specialists (NARS). About Us. https://narsrepo.com/
29. Cox Automotive (Cox Enterprises). Manheim Insights. https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/manheim-insights/
30. PitchBook / PRNewswire. Primeritus Financial Services profile and acquisition history (Kinderhook Industries private-equity ownership). https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/54674-02
31. American Recovery Association (ARA). State Requirements (state-by-state licensing/bonding reference). https://repo.org/state-requirements/
32. U.S. SEC filings and Research and Markets. OPENLANE/Copart/RB Global-IAA/ACV Auctions filings; "US Vehicle Auction Market 2025–2030" ($3.47B in 2024 → $4.48B by 2030). 2025–2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar
33. CNN Business. "Elizabeth Warren launches probe into booming car repossessions." February 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/business/car-prices-repossession-elizabeth-warren