This is the way I've seen it too. It may not be everywhere now, but it was meant to be a safety net in the event that a car was totaled and you still owed the

This is the way I've seen it too. It may not be everywhere now, but it was meant to be a safety net in the event that a car was totaled and you still owed the finance company money. For the finance companies, this was essentially free money. Of course they ran loss statistics on it to make sure that it was in their favor, but I did see it save people from a really bad situation. My coworker, driving to work one day got hit and totaled his car. He actually got his car loan at the company we worked for before he started working there. They just wrote off the car, and he was able to go and get a new 0% interest loan. Total win for him. This is the exception not the norm though.