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First, try CapitalOne Auto Navigator where you can see if you pre-qualify for auto financing with only a soft pull.
On your Cap1 card pay that down to 9% or less. This should help give you a boost on your score. (I would do this over paying off the truck (assume you want to trade in or sell?)). The truck loan will keep your score boosted for the time being.
Are you able to come up with some down payment money? This will help / may be neccesary.
A credit union is a great idea but I would wait until you are ready to buy to go through the process. I am not sure how PenFed will look at all of your late payments. Do some research on PenFed here, the benefit of using them is that it is only one Equifax Hard Pull for all the products you apply for in the first 90 days (YMMV).
Good luck and glad to hear life is heading in the right direction for you.
I agree with the above comment, pay down your card still and try to have some down payment/equity in your trade to help with financing. I know this sounds crazy but in some lender's eyes, the slow payment's can sometimes entice them (as long as they aren't 60 or 90 day lates) because they look at that as added revenue due to late fee's. Now obviously if every payment was late for 2 year's straight that might be a different story. Another issue you may run into is job time, many lender's don't like thin files with short job time as there isn't much comparable credit to base their decision off of and your stability/ability might be limited, so keep that in mind.
Many finance companies will not consider overtime as income until you've been on the job for awhile...Although you have been in a certain "field" for quite some time, they still generally only consider your current employment time. Stability is a key factor in decisioning for underwriter's when credit isn't stellar. They care that you stay at a job for a long period of time and don't hop around from job to job. With money down and getting that utilization down and possibly waiting until you've been on the job for 6+ months I think you should be fine.