Also remember, car dealers make a TON on financing. They're not finding financing for you to help you get into a car per se, they're doing it to line their pockets with the derivative payments they get for loan origination. When they finance the vehicle the lender on the loan allow the dealer to tack on as many as 2 - 8 points which gets kicked back to them on top of the $200 origination bounty.
So that $500/mo car payment you financed, you're dealer is receiving about $50 of that in pure profit each month.
The financing game was so lucrative in fact that General Motors realized they could make more money on the financing of vehicles and the life of the loan, than the profit from the sale of the actual vehicle itself and thus came the rise of GMAC Financing.
Of course the only way to make more money through financing is to make sure consumers stay in loans and keep purchasing new cars from you, and the best way to do that? Engineer vehicles with obsolesces that keep breaking down or cost so much to maintain, that without gap insurance, they can't sell the car and leave you and can only come back to you for another car and yet another refinancing package.
THat's right gents; GM honchos realized they weren't in the car business to sell you a car - they made cars to sell you a financing package.
It was a brilliant ploy that led to why GM vehicles were such insufferable POS's from the late-70s all the way through the mid-2000's when the gig was finally up and the financial collapse of 08 exposed the truth and what GM had been up to the last 30 years and why they never had the same reliability or longevity of the big three Japanese counterparts. It's not because they could not - it's because they did not want to make cars that lasted 150, 160, 200K miles without too much hassle (unless it was their duty, commercial fleet, and heavy contractor lines).
But I've digressed. Sorry for the derail.