Can a 17 year old finance a car?

Answer 1

17 year olds generally cannot legally enter into contracts, and a finance agreement is a contract.

That said, my wife did it (without realizing she shouldn't have been able to). She used a local finance company that had done business with her grandparents before, the agent processing the loan was friends with them, and she had started a part time job when she was 14 so they saw three years of work history and that she was already in college and didn't look closely at her birth date.

It was a used car so the loan wasn't for a huge amount and she did make all the payments on time until the loan was repaid, so there was no harm done in the long run, but they'd have been stuck if she had decided not to because the contract wouldn't have been enforceable. So you shouldn't count on being able to repeat this experience; it was a combination of human error and being in the days when everything was done on paper and fed into a computer later if at all.