Car Buyers Are Happier. Dealers, Take Note.

If you run a Las Vegas dealership, the 2025 Car Buyer Journey Study is the rare piece of industry research that reads like good news. Buyers are happier than they have been in the 16 years Cox Automotive has run this survey. New-vehicle satisfaction hit an all-time high. And a quarter of new-vehicle buyers now use AI tools somewhere in their shopping, which means the useful question is no longer whether your customers use AI. They already do. The question is what they find when they use it on you.

The study surveyed 2,300 consumers in fall 2025 who had bought a new or used vehicle in the prior 12 months, and Cox Automotive published the results on January 13, 2026. Below are the numbers that matter to a store, then the three operational moves that follow from them, and one honest note about what the study does not measure.

The findings in one table

Two things jump out of that table. The first is that the record satisfaction is not evenly spread: 71% of all buyers were highly satisfied, which also means roughly 3 in 10 were not. The second is that AI is no longer a fringe behavior among the people spending the most money in your store.

The deal is splitting in two, and that is fine

53% of buyers completed all steps at the dealership and 7% bought completely online. Subtract both from the whole and you get 40% who did part of the deal online and part of it in your showroom. That middle group is now larger than the fully online group by a factor of nearly six, and it is the group your process should be built around.

This is a friendlier finding than the last decade of digital retailing predictions suggested. Nobody is asking you to sell cars like a checkout cart. They are asking you to let a buyer finish the paperwork steps they already started at home instead of restarting them at a desk. Trade appraisal, credit application, payment options, and document upload are the four steps most often begun before arrival. If a customer has to re-enter any of them in person, you have converted a completed step into a repeated one, and repetition is the thing satisfaction scores punish.

AI shoppers are the satisfied ones

19% of all buyers and 25% of new-vehicle buyers used AI websites or AI-generated overviews while shopping. Among mostly-digital buyers who actually engaged with AI assistants, 84% reported high satisfaction, and 59% reported high satisfaction with AI-powered assistance overall.

Read that in the right direction. The AI did not make anyone buy a car. It answered a narrow question quickly: does this trim have the tow package, what does a 48-month lease look like at this price, is this VIN still on the lot. Buyers who got fast, specific answers stayed happy. Buyers who had to wait for a callback to learn whether a car was still available did not get counted in that 84%.

The practical implication for a store is unglamorous. The information an AI overview surfaces about your inventory is whatever your listings, your website, and your Google Business Profile actually say. Stale prices, missing trim details, and thin vehicle descriptions do not just look bad on a search results page now. They get summarized and handed to a buyer as fact. This is the cheapest work on the list and most stores have not done it. It is also the part of AI for auto dealerships that pays before you automate anything at all.

Affordability is doing the rest of the work

62% of buyers feel that leasing or owning a car is too costly. 66% considered both new and used, and 29% weighed leasing against buying, the highest that figure has been in the study. 34% of new-car buyers said tariffs accelerated their decision, and 68% of the buyers who purchased sooner were satisfied with the price they paid.

A buyer who is cross-shopping new against used, and lease against purchase, is asking a comparison question, not a product question. They want the same vehicle expressed four ways. The stores that answer that quickly are answering the single most common objection in the market right now, and the 68% figure suggests that moving decisively has not been punishing buyers on price.

What the study does not measure

Cox does not report dealership phone or lead response times anywhere in this research, so nothing above tells you how fast stores answer. That gap matters, because every digital and AI-assisted behavior in the table ends the same way: a human being tries to contact a dealership.

The only sourced numbers we have on that are general small-business figures, not dealership-specific ones, and we are labeling them as such. Our missed call statistics page collects them: 62% of calls to small businesses went unanswered, split between 37.8% answered by a person, 37.8% to voicemail, and 24.3% with no response at all, in a 411 Locals study of 85 businesses across 58 industries monitored for 30 days. About 80% of callers who reach voicemail hang up without leaving a message. 75% of callers who cannot reach one business call a competitor instead, usually within minutes, per BrightLocal. 78% of customers buy from the first company that responds, per Velocify. And responding inside five minutes rather than 30 makes a lead 21 times more likely to qualify, per the Lead Response Management Study.

Here is a worked example using our own assumptions, not study figures. Assume a store takes 600 inbound sales and service calls a month. Apply the general 62% miss rate and 372 of those calls go unanswered. Assume, again as our own estimate, that 1 in 20 of those callers was a buyer ready to move this week: that is 18 buyers a month who called you, got nothing, and by the BrightLocal figure very likely called another store within minutes. Substitute your real call volume and your real close rate on answered calls before you believe any of it. We refuse the popular claim that a missed call costs a fixed thousand dollars, because nobody sources it, and you should refuse it too. What we recommend instead is measuring your own miss rate first, which is what missed call recovery actually starts with.

What to do this week

Three things, all of which you can do without hiring anyone.

1. Pull one week of call data from your phone system. You want three numbers: total inbound calls, how many were answered by a person, and how many arrived outside your posted hours. That is your baseline. Until you have it, every vendor pitch about call handling is unfalsifiable.
2. Audit ten of your own vehicle listings as an AI would read them. Check price freshness, trim detail, options, availability, and whether the payment and lease options are stated. If a summary of that page would mislead a buyer, fix the page, because 25% of new-vehicle buyers are reading summaries.
3. Pick one deal step to finish online and make it stick. Trade appraisal or credit application is the usual first choice. Then instruct the desk not to redo it in person. The 40% of buyers who split their purchase between home and showroom will notice immediately.

If you want a second set of eyes on where your store is losing those calls, we do a free 15-minute audit and will tell you honestly if nothing is broken, and you can read what that covers on our auto dealership page.