Speaking with Paul Daly at the CBT Fair Pricing and Compliance Summit, CarEdge co-founder Zach Shefska laid out a real shift: when consumers ask AI platforms where to buy a car, the citations increasingly come from objective, auditable pricing data rather than star ratings.
This industry has been saturated with a handful of really bad actors that have ruined it for everyone else, and the data backs that up.
Worth noting up front: the dataset behind that claim comes from CarEdge's own dealer grading system, not an independent third party. It's a real, sizable dataset (tens of thousands of out-the-door price quotes across roughly 11,000 dealerships), but it's still Shefska's own company's data, worth keeping in mind as you read the numbers below.
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The Checklist: What This Actually Means for Your Store
☐ Know where you'd actually land on a transparency grade.
CarEdge's system grades dealers on FTC-aligned criteria: is pricing clearly communicated, does it change, are add-ons disclosed and optional. According to their data, sub-15% of graded dealerships land in the F/D range, and 60% pull an A. Most dealers are already doing this right. Almost none are able to prove it to a customer, or an algorithm, in the moment that matters.
☐ Stop treating transparency as a compliance checkbox and start treating it as a growth lever.
Shefska's framing is blunt: the FTC is a stick (up to $50,000 per infraction, enforcement-dependent), but Carvana is the carrot. Carvana's entire brand is built on visible pricing and disclosed condition, and it's working commercially, not just regulatorily.
Carvana is actually the best thing that could ever happen to our industry.
