Gadgetopia

High-tech ‘repo man’ keeps car payments coming: This seems like a really great solution to keep people honest about their car payments.

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.

Why didn’t someone think of this before? And how easy would it be to circumvent?