Dealerships should educate customers about fraudulent credit repair tactics and make sure borrowers are improving their credit profiles legally.

Kerry Pacifico, who died last month of heart failure at the age of 95, was the mastermind behind the Pacifico approach, a strategy of standardizing how interest rates are charged on auto loans.

The American Financial Services Association says rule changes proposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last spring could be applied to first-party creditors such as auto lenders.

Some trends that characterized the auto-lending marketplace entering the last decade will carry over to the next.