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Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
Austin Elias-de Jesus
Newsletter editor
Owning a car is a fundamental part of life in the U.S. Americans rely on their private vehicles to get to work, to shepherd their kids around, and just to survive in areas of the country where public transportation isn’t readily accessible. We’re attached to our cars, and it shows. Collectively, Americans owe more than a trillion in auto debt, and, last year, 1.7 million vehicles were repossessed.
In this week’s issue, the staff writer Paige Williams goes inside the booming repo industry, riding along with Matthew Pitman, a longtime repo man whose popular YouTube channel, RepoNut, chronicles the daily grind of repoing. The result is a piece that shows just how fraught, shadowy, and dangerous that work can be. (In 2023, at least seven repossessors were killed—the highest number on record.) I spoke with Williams about how Pitman’s story illuminates the industry, and what has led to the staggering number of repossessions in recent years.
The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.
How did you come across Matthew Pitman, a.k.a. RepoNut?
When my editor, Micah Hauser, asked me to write about the repossession industry, I started reading (and watching, and listening) widely on the topic. Pitman had been interviewed about his work on a podcast hosted by a former air-traffic controller. That appearance led me to his YouTube channel, RepoNut, which contains more than eight hundred videos of repossessions he has carried out, dating back to 2008.
As Micah so nicely puts it, there’s a narrative magnetism to Pitman’s repo encounters, many of which play out as micro-dramas of people in crisis confronting an embodied messenger of the great, unfeeling, deeply unfair American financial system. These moments of friction reveal a lot about the country, the economy, the centrality of the car in American life, and the moral compromises we make when performing our jobs.
You describe several pretty harrowing and thorny scenes of repossession. One man literally runs after and jumps onto Pitman’s truck. What makes repoing so dangerous?
Fear, mostly, and ignorance. Repossessors operate by stealth. They work quickly and, usually, in the wee hours, when most target vehicles are at home, and debtors are sleeping. That’s when a repo agent is most likely to be mistaken for a thief in the night. Debtors have been known to come out shooting.
There were a record number of vehicle repossessions last year. Why is that?
Inflation; the escalating price of automobiles; an auto-financing industry that’ll “get you in,” no matter what, as one source put it. There’s a range of interconnected reasons. Pandemic-relief payments took some of the pressure off of consumers, but that pressure is back, and rising.
The industry is also underregulated. Why is this?
Automobile repossession is predominantly regulated at the state level. This means that the country has patchwork laws: what is legal in Arizona or Alabama may be against the law in Massachusetts or California. The American Recovery Association has been pushing for unity among repo agencies, but the A.R.A. is an industry trade group, not a regulatory agency. Over all, the industry is much more complex and nuanced than I’d imagined it to be, and its central mission is vital to what one source described as the functioning of America’s “ecosystem of cars.” A system without meaningful oversight can’t help but operate in what one source described as “chaos.”
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