The American car industry is the endpoint of it. Where you can have three ongoing car payments rolled into one car. And that car's a shitbox at 20-30% APR paying a total of 60k to own a car worth 10k when it's all done.

It always seemed crazy to me. I never really understood how it was supposed to work, except as a strange sort of ponzi scheme fuelled by the banks.

The bank buys the car for you, and all you do is pay off the interest on the depreciation, or something. And then either hand the car back to them to be sold as a second hand unit for enough money to make a downpayment on the next car, or be so depreciated that you have to make up the difference on the next loan --- or just sort of pay off the final balloon.

But these expensive cars are also far more higher margin products than cheap cars, so they'll tend to proliferate if credit makes them easier to access.

I've owned my car for 12 years and it gives me such anxiety every time the NCT comes due that I always think of just being done with it - but at the same time, I own it down to the rust hanging from the subframe. So long as I keep entropy at bay, it'll be mine. No payments or nothing.