Emilio Estevez played one in the 1984 cult movie Repo Man. Rocky Balboa was another, of sorts. More than 20 years on, the car “repossession man” is back. And Americans are far from pleased.

Repo men are not popular. Their appearance on a driveway, in front of the glare of neighbours, carries a stigma, an admission of financial hardship. Moreover, their methods are often seen as sneaky.

According to Rick St Marie, the head of National Recovery Network, the American bailiffs’ group, the main rule of repossession is that there should be no breach of the peace . . . so vehicles may be removed from driveways without the debtor’s knowledge, often at night. “We don’t do a lot of knocking at doors,” he said.

On the Professional Collateral Recovery Agents website, repo men are given tips for vehicle repossession. It encourages them to allow debtors to remove child seats from the car before it is repossessed (“car seats are a big deal”) and to open the car themselves because “some debtors do keep loaded guns in their cars”.

And they have good reason to be wary. In this new era of repo men, their motorists are already in enough trouble. Wall Street’s moneymen worry that those falling behind with their vehicle repayments are frequently the same low-paid Americans struggling to repay the home loans that are at the heart of the sub-prime mortage crisis that has caused such havoc in the financial markets. Being just two months behind with car loan repayments – at least for sub-prime borrowers – usually leads to the lender, such as Wells Fargo or Americredit, referring the defaulted loan to a repo man.

Repo men’s remit is to reclaim a vehicle whose owner has defaulted on repayments, hold the car for a period to allow its owner to pay the loan plus costs, or auction the vehicle and charge the balance of the outstanding loan back to the former car owner. In most cases, the debtor cannot pay.

New figures from the National Auto Finance Association – which represents America’s sub-prime car lending market – show a surge in the number of vehicle loans that defaulted last year. Borrowers who were at least 30 days late with car loan repayments jumped to the highest level for three years in 2006. The data showed that lenders who made more than 40,000 sub-prime car loans in 2006 saw the percentage of those in arrears jump from 6.8 per cent to 8 per cent, while lenders who offered less than 40,000 saw their arrears levels more than double from 6.2 per cent in 2005 to 14.6 per cent in the same period.

The numbers are fuelling fears that the crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market is spilling over into the sub-prime car loans market, estimated to be worth $300 billion (£150 billion) a year.

While Americredit, one of the biggest sub-prime car loan providers in the United States, insists that it is not seeing a surge in delinquencies “beyond normal seasonal fluctuations”, analysts on Wall Street and American car bailiffs whose clients include banks such as Americredit, are far more sceptical. Last month, Goldman Sachs recommended that its clients sell Americredit stock and said that “the auto loan securitisation market is only partially open for business. Investor demand for sub-prime assets remains uncertain”. Americredit shares, traded on Wall Street, have fallen 37 per cent since June.

Mr St Marie is certain that the same malaise infecting the mortgage market is spreading to car loans. A year ago, he estimated that his company was handling between 200 and 350 car repossessions a month. He is now handling between 600 and 800 cases a month: “Even if you strip out the effect of increased marketing, I am seeing a big increase in call volumes and assignments - up 25 or 30 per cent last month alone – just by virtue of the state of the economy.” Mr St Marie said that the rise in repossessions appeared to be affecting poorer and middle-income families most. “It’s not the high-dollar Mercedes and RVs we are repossessing.”

Steve Norwood, founder of Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems, bailiffs based in North Carolina, said that there was an unprecedented number of debtors who were voluntarily returning their vehicles to recovery agencies to protect their credit rating.

“This is unique. It is very unusual for this many people to be volunteering their cars. It used to be 2 to 3 per cent of the cases we handled. Now it’s more than 10 per cent.”

As a guide, Mr Norwood estimated that in America between 1.5 million and two million cars were repossessed last year, “with around only half being picked up”. The sub-prime car loans market is very similar to the sub-prime mortgage market, except for the crucial difference in the speed with which a car can be repossessed.

Jack Tracey, director of the NAF, said: “There are not as many legal hurdles to reclaim collateral as to reclaim a house. To put someone out on the street is much harder.” While both a homeowner and a car owner become “delinquents” once they are 30 days late for a repayment, it takes roughly six months to evict someone, as little as two months to repossess a car.

Nervousness around the state of the sub-prime car loan market was also fuelled by a recent study compiled by the US Consumer Bankers’ Association, which showed that borrowers had been gradually extending the length of their loan – to an average of around 65 months – and reducing the size of the deposit. According to the study, deposits in 2006 were typically around 5 per cent of the value of the car, and have fallen to 1 per cent during the course of this year.

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