One of life cruel quirks got Amber Jumbelick into trouble. When the 23 year-old waitress had her first child, she begun paying expenses by credit cards. Then she lost her job and ability to pay bills. Her credit tanked. “I needed a car, but my credit was so bad nobody would give me a loan,” Jumbelick said. “I’m a waitress and a single mom with a baby boy. I don’t have extra money to put away.”

Chucks Lutes hears that sort of story a lot. Lutes, owner of Affordable Auto Sales on 66^th Street N in St. Petersburg, think he has found a solution. It’s a device he installs on every car he sells that alerts drivers when they have a payment due. Day by delinquent day, the alerts gets increasingly insistent. On the fifth day, the car won’t start.

A little black box with a four-button keypad is mounted under the dash and connected to the car’s electrical harness. Lutes says the device, called On Time/ Payment Protection Systems has dramatically increased customers’ on-time payments. Jumbelick says the need to pay up and pay on time has improved her credit score after less than a year. With this system, I don’t have to go out chasing my money. “Lutes said. “And I want the money, not the car.” Lutes has been using On Time since October. According to his computer data files, only 65b percent of his customers were making payments on time before October. Now, about 95 percent of his accounts are current. Mike Simon, president and chief executive officer of Payment Protection System in Temecula Calif. Said the idea for On-Time device came from a plea from a car dealer in 1996. “We make microchips for auto-related things, like security, and one day a dealer said he wished we could make a chip that would make people pay on-time.” Simon said. “That sounded like reasonable request. The technology is out there.

Three years later, On Time was born. Simon said 1,500 dealers across the country use the little devices, even some traditional new-car dealers. Both Simon and Lutes think Affordable Auto Sales is the only dealership using On Time in the Tampa Bay area. The little black box with a four-button keypad is mounted under the dash and connected to the car’s electrical harness. Once the dealer and the customer have agreed on a payment schedule- and Lutes insists on weekly payments- the schedule is loaded into a windows-based computer program in the dealer’s office.

As long as payments are made on time, the lights on the module shows green. On the first day a payment is delinquent, the lights blinks red for 24 hours. On day two it flashes in pulses of two. On day three, they are three pulses in quick succession. On day four it beeps all day long. On day five, the car stops working.

 As soon as a payment is made, the customer is given a code to punch into the module that returns it to green until the next payment comes due. Once a car is paid for, the module is removed and used on another vehicle. They have seven-year life spans.

The device will not shut a car down while on it’s operation. If the payment is five days late, It simply won’t start again. “It definitely works.” Jumbelick said. “I got in the car (a 1993 Saturn) once, and the light was red, and I thought, “Uh-0h, I’d better go make a payment.”

Lutes said he doesn’t even run credit checks on customers anymore. He checks with landlords and utility companies—a de-emphasis on credit that is spreading to even traditional car dealers, according to Simon. “Bad things happen to good people.” He said. “Dealers, traditional and otherwise, are beginning to ask where you live and how long you’ve lived there, do you have a job, and that’s it. Traditional dealers are losing 33 percent of potential customers to credit issues when that level of loss probably isn’t necessary.”