Ford: Credit Still Available to Car Buyers

When the Great Depression hit, it came over a stock ticker, not via myriad hyperventilating news outlets and personality-driven 24-hour cable news loudspeakers.

What happens when every talking head on TV says there's no credit? Well, people assume there's no credit.

Ford wants to make it abundantly clear that it has its own finance company and is still lending to car buyers. Ford's financing arm is willing to lend and lease to consumers with decent — not just perfect and sparkling, but decent — credit ratings, head of sales and marketing Jim Farley told the Detroit News.

Now the only challenge in this dismal market is to communicate that to buyers. Watch for advertising to begin to highlight the fact that Ford (and other automakers, like Toyota) still have loans available to most car buyers. It's a stark contrast to recent news from GMAC restricting credit.

Ford Wants Customers to Know Loans Are Available to Buy Cars (Detroit News)

Comments

Although I would never buy a Ford I always suspected their mgt is smarter than GM's. This article pretty much proves it. It never ceases to amaze me how much the media is biased and uninformed - just like 90% of America.

Journalism is akin to being a realtor or used car salesman. The amount of quality journalists can be counted on one hand. Steve Lopez and Charles Krauthammer come to mind, but that's pretty much it.

yeah, but one thinks one could get credit and then one gets there and you get the real deal. if you want GM, you need 700+ score or bring your own. Ford might say you may get it, but they might say no or give really high terms if one has 690.

Actually if you can't pay your water and phone bills, you are not going to be able to pay for a car, and less a mortgage.
Mitsu "sold" cars to people with no credit and lost a lot of money and had to repo a lot of cars, same as usual.
The USA is the only country where people who couldn't buy a $1000 tv on credit in Best Buy, could have a mortgage for a house.

Since both are still lending it proves credit is still available. Like has been pointed out before the responsible people usually buy used. It will be interesting if the responsible people are forced to buy new due to lack of new cars or overpriced used. I notice that prices are generally pretty high for decent milleage used car, whatever year. Seems to me the average price is close to 3K used. Must be a lack of supply.

Ruhl,
What are you talking about?

The fact is Ford Credit doesn't have the investments in real estate mortgages that GMAC does, thus they're not as hamstrung due to the credit crisis. We've been covering how much harder it is to get credit for weeks now.

Dave,
You are incorrect. FMCC (Ford Motor Credit Co) does have real estate holdings (ie ABS - Asset Backed Securities). I work for Fitch Ratings and we issue IDR's. FMCC's holding of ABS's was a core reason why we recently issued a downgrade. Ford does currently have enough book liquidity to not effect their credit line extensions however the current climate necessitates ongoing monitoring so things could change rather quickly.
As much as I admire this site I too believe quality journalism is unfortunately a thing of the past.

QH,
You are implying that this site has published misinformation or poorly written articles and neither is the case. Or are you merely stating your general opinion on journalism?

QH,
My statement was "the investment" meaning as heavily tied to the bad mortgage investments as GMAC. Not that they have none. That is a bigger part of GMAC's business as far as I understand it but feel free to correct me.

To Watchdog's point:
We try very, very hard here to provide accurate information for car shoppers and when we state our opinions we usually spell it out that they are such and not fact. We then enjoy conversations and disagreements in the comments.

If you ever notice a true inaccuracy or fault in one of our posts or a Cars.com story feel free to point it out.

U know, I really don't understand what all these fusses are about, I mean, bad credit buyers WERE able to buy vehicles on loans before, correct? So it's really not that big of a deal when Ford said that it will still provide credit to anyone. The tricky point here is - if u've a BAD credit, not only must u come up with a large downpayment, but you have to pay a high interest rate too. That's why I said in my previous post on GMAC that manufacturers - actually its financial division - preys on bad credit buyers. The money loss is not really on the vehicle itself, but on the INTEREST! It's how profits ar being made on bad credit people, but not those who can get a 0 or 1% loan.

If you have bad credit, you absolutely should have to pay a relatively high interest rate. Risk vs. Reward - simple financial principle.