7:15 am, September 15, 2026
Car dealer readers have reported unreasonable behaviour from customers has mostly got worse in the last year.
Some 68.5% of those polled said unreasonable customer behaviour towards their staff has either ‘increased significantly’ or ‘slightly’ in the last year alone.
Car Dealer has carried out a detailed survey – in conjunction with online sales platform Cazoo – into trust in the motor trade.
Over a three week period, more than 3,000 votes were cast online and via daily polls in our WhatsApp groups.
Car Dealer readers were asked about the impact of reviews, the current situation with customer behaviour and car buyers’ expectations in their dealerships.
‘These results show a worrying trend that car buyers are treating car dealers poorly,’ said Car Dealer editor in chief James Baggott.
‘Anyone who works in a dealership knows that sometimes car buyers can be incredibly unreasonable and some of the poor behaviour we’ve experienced at the Clever Car Collection has certainly been a revelation to me.
‘While most dealers work very hard to look after their customers, even when they’re being unreasonable, no one should expect to be treated poorly when they’re just doing their job.’
The results
When asked what they thought could be done to improve trust between dealers and customers, nearly a third (29.7%) said they’d like to see an accreditation scheme put in place by either the government or the motor trade.
However, the majority of respondents said the one thing they believe the industry could collectively do to improve trust was to ‘tackle rogue traders’. Some 36.1% of votes cast backed this solution.
In the last year, Car Dealer readers said the biggest change they’d seen in how customers approached buying a car was by doing more research (30.4%), while others found customers were taking longer to decide (15.3%), and were more price sensitive (13%).
When asked specifically how much more research customers are doing now compared to 12 months ago before buying a car nearly 70% said ‘much more’ and a further 20% believed it was ‘slightly more’.
Despite these changes, more than half (50.3%) of our readers said it was ‘rare’ or they ‘never saw’ customers who had arrived at their dealership braced for confrontation.
However, the other half (48.9%) said they had experienced customers in their showrooms arrive ready to do battle ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’.
Overall, the impact of online reviews has been positive for readers with 46.3% of respondents saying they had been positive and 34.6% claiming they had been ‘very positive’.
Google was by far and away the most important online reviews platform for respondents with some 64.8% of readers citing it as their top reviews site. Trustpilot was second with 18.3% of votes and Autotrader third with 11.6%.
Our Car Dealer readers said that they used a variety of steps to help demonstrate transparency to customers including handing over history check paperwork (31.9%), producing video walkarounds of cars for sale (25.9%) and offering transparent or fixed pricing (18%).
Positively, most respondents believed that trust in car dealers had either stayed the same as this time last year or improved (69.8%).
However, nearly a third (30.2%) believed trust in dealers had got worse either ‘slightly’ or ‘significantly’.
And when it came to what concerned customers the most before buying a car, our readers believed that ‘undisclosed faults or condition’ was most important (32.2%).
The car’s history was cited as the second most important concern with 15.6% of the vote and the warranty and aftersales provided by the dealer third most important (12.2%).
Baggott added: ‘This survey is a comprehensive look at what the motor trade is dealing with when it comes to trust and my thanks go to Cazoo for helping us pull this together and highlight what’s really happening out there.’
Ad platform Cazoo has been separately polling consumers on trust and the results of that exclusive survey will be revealed next week.