Recovery is a legal variable, not a portfolio constant
When an auto loan defaults, the number you eventually record as recovery is the output of a legal pipeline, and the pipeline is built by the state, not by the contract. Four questions decide almost everything. Can you take the vehicle without a court order? Must you first send the borrower a notice and give them a window to cure? Once the vehicle is sold, can you pursue the shortfall as a deficiency judgment? And if you win that judgment, can you actually collect it from wages? A book spread across state lines is carrying a blended answer to those four questions, whether or not anyone has ever written it down.
The four levers, and the weights on them
The method scores each jurisdiction out of 100. A state earns points for each lever that runs in the recovering party's favor. The weights are the exact ones used in the map.
| Lever | What earns the points | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Self-help repossession | Permitted under UCC §9-609, the vehicle can be recovered without a court order, provided there is no breach of the peace | 35 pts |
| No mandatory right to cure | No pre-repossession notice-and-cure window is required before taking the collateral | 20 pts |
| Deficiency judgment | The shortfall after sale can be pursued as a deficiency judgment | 20 pts |
| Wage garnishment | Garnishment is available to collect that deficiency from wages | 25 pts |
| Total | A clean, fast, low-cost, collectable recovery environment | 100 pts |
Three of the classifications carry named statutory anchors. Louisiana is the only state with no self-help repossession; recovery there runs through judicial executory process, so every repossession starts in court. The right-to-cure requirement covers 20 of the 51 jurisdictions, largely the states that enacted the Uniform Consumer Credit Code, plus California under the Rees-Levering Act. And Wisconsin bars a post-repossession deficiency only when the balance at default was $1,000 or less (Wis. Stat. 425.209), so on a typical auto contract a deficiency is generally still available there.
How the country splits
Score all 51 jurisdictions and only five distinct values occur: 100, 80, 75, 55, and 45. That is because the deficiency lever never differentiates in this dataset, every jurisdiction permits a deficiency on a typical auto balance, so its 20 points act as a floor. What actually moves the map is the cure requirement, the garnishment block, and Louisiana's judicial-only rule. The counts: 28 jurisdictions score a clean 100. Eighteen score 80, meaning a cure notice is required but everything else is intact. Three score 75, Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, where no cure notice is required but wage garnishment is blocked. South Carolina scores 55, the only state that stacks a cure requirement on top of a garnishment block. Louisiana scores 45, alone in the Restrictive tier.
Ten states that show the spread
The full map carries all 51 jurisdictions; these ten cover every distinct score and every lever combination that occurs in the data.
| State | Self-help | Right to cure | Deficiency | Garnishment | Score | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia | Allowed | Not required | Available | Available | 100 | Strong |
| New York | Allowed | Not required | Available | Available | 100 | Strong |
| California | Allowed | Required (Rees-Levering) | Available | Available | 80 | Standard |
| Colorado | Allowed | Required (UCCC) | Available | Available | 80 | Standard |
| Wisconsin | Allowed | Required | Available* | Available | 80 | Standard |
| Texas | Allowed | Not required | Available | Blocked | 75 | Standard |
| Pennsylvania | Allowed | Not required | Available | Blocked | 75 | Standard |
| North Carolina | Allowed | Not required | Available | Blocked | 75 | Standard |
| South Carolina | Allowed | Required | Available | Blocked | 55 | Friction |
| Louisiana | Judicial only | Required | Available | Available | 45 | Restrictive |
One loan, three states
To see the levers work, take one synthetic contract: a $11,400 balance at default, the vehicle recovered and sold at auction for $6,200, leaving a $5,200 shortfall. Every number in this example is invented for illustration, no real loan, borrower, or portfolio is depicted. The contract is identical in all three columns. The state is the only thing that changes.
| Step | Georgia (100) | South Carolina (55) | Louisiana (45) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Path to the vehicle | Self-help, no court order | Self-help, after the cure window | Judicial executory process, court first |
| Notice before acting | None required | Right-to-cure notice, borrower may reinstate | Filing precedes recovery |
| Shortfall after sale | $5,200 claim available | $5,200 claim available | $5,200 claim available |
| Collecting it | Wage garnishment available | Garnishment blocked, recovery effectively stops at the auction proceeds | Garnishment available, at the end of the judicial channel |
Limits
This method sees four flags per state. Real statutes are not flags. Cure windows differ in length and in reinstatement terms; garnishment states differ in exemptions and caps, and "available" is never the same thing as "easy". The score also has no time axis: it does not measure how long a judicial process takes, and county-level docket speed can matter as much as the statute itself. It says nothing about breach-of-peace litigation exposure in self-help states, nothing about the voluntary-surrender share of a book, which changes how often these levers are even pulled, and nothing about contract- or program-specific terms, which control in practice. Finally, statutes drift. A static classification decays, and any specific repossession or collection question belongs with licensed counsel in the relevant state, not with a scoring model.