The Carpocalypse has forced automakers to try and entice nervous buyers by offering to remove the burden of a car payment should consumers lose their jobs or worse. But which plan’s the best?

Hyundai was first on the “car payment protection” scene with their Hyundai Assurance Program, followed today by Ford and GM with their Ford Advantage and GM Total Confidence plans, respectively.

All three plans on their own are pretty confusing. Combined, all three are just a mess of different offerings of help in case you lose your job. Each offers different results for different scenarios. So, in order to make this understandable, we’ve broken down each plan and their specific option sets to allow you an opportunity to determine which will work best for you.

For starters, all three programs offer some combination of two different types of help for people facing a personal economic crisis: negative equity coverage and payment assistance. Let’s define some of these terms:

Equity: The amount of investment in an asset.

Negative Equity:This is when the amount owed on something is greater than the total value of the asset itself. In terms of cars, this means you owe more on the car than the car itself is actually worth. This is the opposite of positive equity. Positive equity would be when you have a car and you owe $2,000 but it is worth $9,000 on the used car market. In this case, you probably shouldn’t try to turn it in. Instead, if you’re smart, you’ll just sell it.

Negative Equity Coverage: This is a form of coverage that depending on the level provided, allows you to be forgiven up to a certain amount of monies still remaining in payments on the car. Each plan is different, ranging from several thousand dollars to zero.

Payment Assistance: Assuming you lose your job, the automaker will either take over payment for a certain period of time or payback the lender.

Click here to read the wonderful analysis from our friends @ Jalopnik.  

For those who are impatient and wait, the winner is Hyundai (there are a lot of caveats to this selection).  You are better advised to read the whole analysis before starting to agree with the result.  For those who are absolutely impatient and can’t wait to read the elaborate analysis here is the summary of comparision.