Car Buyer Satisfaction Tanks in June

CDK’s three years of tracking car shoppers’ opinions on the purchase process has never seen a monthly drop as large as the one in June. Just a month ago, the primary metric in our Ease of Purchase Scorecard was at 90% with only one weakness: inventory was harder to find. In June, the number of people who said it was easy to buy their car fall to 77%, and nearly every other metric followed that downward spiral, some even more significantly. 

Inventory has been a key lever in the Ease of Purchase score in the past. Yet this month, much of the issue was found in the F&I department. The recent credit crunch is having a major impact on car buyers with just over half (53%) saying it was easy to apply for credit, down from 67% just last month. That number is generally never below 60% but did hit 57% in February 2025. 

This wasn’t the only issue inside the F&I office as 57% of buyers said selecting additional F&I products was easy, down from 66% in May. Even filling out paperwork dropped to 68% from 74% in May. 

Having issues with credit often leads to fluctuations in the interest rates buyers can secure impacting the final price. That could explain why agreeing on the final price saw a significant drop in June as well, falling to 56% from 65% in May. And despite a bustling used car market driving valuations up — making customers generally happy with their trade-in value — that was not the case in June. Less than half (48%) said agreeing on the trade-in value was easy, down from 55% in May. 

Running into these multiple issues across the board is rare in our tracking. Inventory disruptions impacting scores is more common but this month there was a twist: Only 67% of buyers said it was easy to find the vehicle they wanted, down from 74% in May. But how they found the car they ended up with shifted in a new way. Far fewer people opted to wait on what they wanted to arrive — ordering it from the factory (15% in June down from 20% in May) and buying it in transit (19% in June down from 22% in May). 

Instead, more people picked an alternate car in stock, 15% up from just 9% in May. Think of all the issues buyers encountered throughout the process, and the car they end up with isn’t even the perfect color or trim they originally wanted. Would that lead them to say it was an easy experience? 

Waiting longer at the dealership during all these steps wouldn’t help improve scores either and, indeed, more than a third (36%) of buyers said the process took longer than they expected, up from 31% in May. That’s one of the highest numbers we’ve seen in that category and is often considerably lower. 

These unprecedented results might be an aberration, but the issues surrounding credit, a tightening of captive finance deals, and other factors will remain throughout the summer, if not longer.