I see this as fundamentally different, mostly because it is far easier to repo a car and auction it off than it is to foreclose on a house and sell it to someon

I see this as fundamentally different, mostly because it is far easier to repo a car and auction it off than it is to foreclose on a house and sell it to someone else. Another thing is that no one is wildly pricing cars; the fact that lots of subprime people are buying cars does not drive up the price of cars for everyone else. Thus, if a whole bunch of subprime borrowers default, the rest of us aren't sitting there with a car that's actually worth a quarter of what we thought it would be worth. We also don't keep an enormous share of our equity in cars the way that we do in housing.