I used to go through old human interest stories in TIME magazine at the high school library back in my teens; this one stuck with me so I looked it up, bought the magazine on eBay, scanned the story, and passed the savings on to you:
With an unusually modern follow-up:
This would have made a good scene for the movie Used Cars... Lesson learned: Always read the fine print!
To do the numbers, 18 payments of $57.10/month for 18 months would have added up to $1027.80. 30 months would have totaled $1713.