If you walk into almost any bank in the country and ask them for an auto loan, the very first thing they are going to do is get the information from you that they will need to check your credit rating. If they don't like what they see when they make that check, then they will send you on your way pretty quickly. If you've made some bad financial decisions in your past, then your credit rating has no doubt suffered. Some of these bad decisions or unfortunate situations could be a few too many missed or late payments or a bankruptcy.
It could also be something like having too many credit cards or having many credit accounts that have not yet been open for very long. Through either your own mistakes or just some bad circumstances, it can be very easy to find yourself stuck with a less than favorable credit score. At banks and other "conventional" sources of loans and financing, this kind of a low credit rating will get you sent right back out the door.
If you have bad credit and need auto loan financing then, you are going to have to look in some different places. You have several options. First, you will find that car lots and dealerships are almost always more likely to finance your purchase. When you hear terms like "on the lot financing" or "buy here, pay here," this is what they are talking about. Car dealerships often times have no problem financing your purchase, even if you have bad credit. To them, it does not really matter if a customer has good credit or bad credit. If they finance a car and you do not make your payments, they will simply come and repossess the car and sell it to someone else. If you think about it, there is not really a whole lot of risk to them.
Recently many small local car lots have been heavily advertising their bad credit auto loan financing services. They know that they can increase their customer base and sell more cars if they include people who normally have too low a credit rating to consider buying a car. You may have noticed these kinds of advertisements cropping up a lot lately, with car dealers advertising themselves as the "credit doctor" or other such characters that supposedly "heal" bad credit scores. This is silly but not completely untrue, because if you do get bad credit auto loan financing, you will ultimately be helping your credit rating. Once you buy and pay off the car, your credit score will increase greatly.
Don't let the banks or anyone else tell you that bad credit auto loan financing is impossibility. If you turn to the car dealers themselves, you may find that you are very much able to get the financing that you will need to buy the car that you want to have. Remember that you win in two ways here: You get the car, and you can improve your credit.