Here's the biggest mistake buyers make on the car lot

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Everyone who rolls up to a car lot wants one thing, a good deal. But new data from the Federal Trade Commission shows most people don't think they're getting one. KDKA investigator Megan Schiller explains what one expert calls the biggest mistake buyers make on the car lot.

[00:00:14]The biggest mistake people make is they negotiate for a monthly payment. When really experts say you need to be negotiating for the big number, which is the price of the car. And you might think, well, the monthly payment is just the big number divided down, but the expert says it's not that simple. You might be thinking $700 monthly payment for 60 months, and the dealer might try to stretch that out to 84 months, and that severely increases the price of the car.

[00:00:40]Exhausting, never-ending, and a headache. Just some of the words Ray Sheshka says car buyers use to describe the experience. What would you rather do, get a root canal or try and buy a car? They're going to say, oh, I'd much rather have that root canal.

[00:00:56]Um, because nobody has found buying a car to be a pleasant experience. Sheshka sold cars for 43 years, and now he's working to bring transparency to the process. He runs CarEdge with his son Zach, using tech like YouTube and TikTok to demystify the car buying process. Do you have a trade-in? Why do I not answer this, or how do I answer this? The best way to answer this is I might or I might not >> Together, the Sheshkas want to return the power and time to millions of consumers. He says the FTC did just give consumers some help, sending this warning letter to 97 dealership groups about advertising no-nos. Advertising a price that doesn't reflect all required fees is illegal. Advertising a price that reflects rebates or discounts that aren't available at all. Advertising a price that fails to take into account the amount of additional required down payment. You can't advertise a price and say, oh, by the way, that included $2,000 down payment from you.

[00:01:55]Well, that that's not an advertised price then. And the FTC says dealers can no longer condition that advertised price on consumers using dealer financing. This comes as new consumer complaint data paints a grim picture.

[00:02:09]We're on track to break records in 2026, and not in a good way. Auto fraud complaints surged 43% in the first quarter of 2026 with 90,000 formal cases. Cheska says consumers can try to get ahead of things by starting with a dealership rated high for transparency.

[00:02:26]CarEdge launched a free dealership transparency index and interactive map.

[00:02:31]We rate dealers on a scale of A to F based on how transparent they are. And so customers can not only shop for cars, they can shop for dealers based on how transparent they are.

[00:02:49]I looked and a lot of the car dealerships in our area earned A's. Only a couple of them had bad scores, and that was for limited data, so that score is likely to bounce up once more negotiations are tracked. And if negotiation isn't really your thing, CarEdge has launched an AI negotiation agent that essentially will do it for you via text and email in order to try to get you the best deal.

[00:03:14]Reporting in the newsroom tonight, I'm Megan Chollar, KDKA TV News.