A new Urban Science and Harris Poll survey of over 3,000 buyers and 252 dealers found shoppers are researching longer, cross-shopping harder, and putting price ahead of brand loyalty. But the most interesting number in the survey might be the one measuring the wrong thing entirely.
Shoppers now spend up to three months researching before buying, with 44% doing more homework upfront than they used to. Traditional dealerships still lead decisively, with 90% of buyers preferring them, but 66% would consider buying through a dealership website, and roughly a quarter say they're open to buying fully online.
Price is winning out over loyalty too: 31% now prioritize value over brand, and 59% say they'd travel further for a better deal. On EVs, the gap between dealers and buyers is stark, 60% of dealers are excited about EVs, while only about a third of buyers are ready to consider one, and 47% say they may never be ready.
Auto buyers are more willing to cross-shop across brands, dealers and marketplaces, extending the buying journey over one to three months.
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The Research Window Never Actually Shrank
Here's the part worth sitting with: buyers have spent up to three months researching a vehicle for years now. Despite every new digital tool, every AI shopping assistant, every improvement in online research speed, that timeline hasn't compressed at all.
If anything, it's holding steady even as the tools available to shoppers keep getting faster. That means a full-funnel marketing approach isn't optional anymore, if it ever was, since a shopper researching today might not walk into a store for another ten weeks.
"Would You Be Open to It" Isn't the Same as "Will You Do It"
The most misleading number in surveys like this is the online-purchase question, since it asks whether someone is open to something, not whether they'd actually do it. Only around a quarter of respondents said yes to that hypothetical. If buying a car fully online were genuinely easy and appealing right now, that number should be much higher, since the actual friction of doing it has been removed for years.
The real signal isn't that online buying is surging, it's that even among people who say they're open to it, most aren't actually choosing it. That gap between stated openness and real behavior is exactly where dealers should be paying attention, not to the headline number, but to why it doesn't convert.
What This Means for Your Store
Give shoppers real online tools, research their payment, browse inventory, start the paperwork, but build every one of those flows to end with a seamless handoff to an in-person conversation, not a fully online checkout. The survey data says most buyers still want that human step at the end. Your digital experience should be built to get them there faster, not to replace it.
