As you know, earlier this year, the FTC sent warning letters to 97 auto groups with one message: advertised prices must include every mandatory fee. Separate cases have ended in multimillion-dollar penalties, settlements and customer refunds.
Ninety-seven is not a lot of letters.
Here's the number that is. 72%.
When we studied reviews in the Widewail Index going back to 2024, 72% of the dealers we looked at had at least one verified review containing an FTC fair pricing complaint.
Not an inspection. Not a mystery shop. A customer, in public, describing the thing the FTC wrote those 97 letters about. (All the data is in this on-demand webinar.)
Put that in stores instead of percent. For a 30-rooftop group, that's roughly 22 stores with one on the record, on a Google page that never expires.
One complaint across two years is not a pattern, and it is not proof. It also isn't nothing. It's a dated, public, customer-signed account of what happened at the desk.
What the FAQs Actually Change
Until now, the guidance was a principle: don't deceive. Car Dealership Guy's breakdown of the FTC's new FAQs is worth your time.
The principle is now a list:
- Mandatory doc and dealer fees must be included. Only government-required charges can be excluded.
- The price any customer can pay must be the most prominent number on listings, even when discounts and rebates are shown.
- The same standard applies to websites, third-party listings, social, print, phone calls and texts.
- Conditional discounts, add-ons, and in-transit or already-sold vehicles have to be clearly disclosed.
What You Can Do
Here’s our take: This is a great opportunity to get your marketing, sales, F&I and compliance teams together for each of your stores and talk through three questions as a leadership team:
- Is the price shown online the price any customer can actually pay, and where are the gray areas or edge cases we should keep an eye on?
- Are our ads, website and employees telling customers the same story about fees, discounts and add-ons? (Note: The employees are the hard part, and probably what you should spend the most time talking about.)
- What are customers actually saying in reviews and surveys about surprise charges or prices changing during the sale? (Ideally, using real review and survey data for this part of the conversation.)
That last question may be the most important. It’s also the hardest to monitor.
A conversation with your staff can tell you how the process is supposed to work. But customer feedback tells you what is actually happening.
We have a product in early beta, Compliance Clarity, which monitors review activity for risk. If you’d like to learn more, reply to the newsletter.
I can also put together a historical fair pricing topic analysis report for your dealership using Index data we already have available. Same deal, reply and I’ll put that together for you.
