That's because nobody was doing CDOs (collaterilzed debt obligations) back then and all the lenders were stuck holding the loans on their books. Now due to financial innovation, we've figured out how to take large quantities of loans, rack them and stack them and turn them into something that looks, smells, and trades a lot like a bond. So you take a bunch of money, loan it out, take the loans, put them together into CDOs, sell them off to investors (mutual funds). That moves the risk of default off your books and onto the books of the investors. And the proceeds of that sale gives you another pile of money to go lend out. Which means you can sell more cars because you have more money to lend to prospective buyers. The trick with this is, essentially, you're aggregating the risk of all the loans. You have to have enough good loans to mix in with the bad ones to make the overall risk pool low enough of a risk for an investor to want to buy it. And certain buyers (like pension funds) are only allowed to buy a CDO if the risk of default is low enough. But the whole thing hinges on being able to get enough buyers with perfect credit scores to take out loans. And people with perfect credit scores are the ones most likely to be able to pay with cash. The end result is the manufacturers end up paying people with perfect credit scores to take out loans because the manufacturers need them to take out a loan far more than they actually need to take out a loan.