CarGurus: Used & New Cars 4+

Very satisfied

During this time of COVID-19 car shopping could be life threatening. I would never shop 300 miles away from home. I was able to find very good deals. When I made the final deal I had 2 dealerships competing and both were giving better deals. I drove right to a place where I knew the vehicle I wanted was located, and if it didn’t look like the pictures or the Carfax report was not good I was able to quickly move on to the next place. No long driving thru car lots and dealing with salesman.
I also attempted to sale a vehicle on this app, that wasn’t as smooth as the buying process. I ended up selling it within an hour on Facebook Marketplace. However, this was an older vehicle with a lot of miles.
The app itself has some glitches. Sometimes frustrating, but really didn’t hinder my search.
Thank you CarGurus for this app

App is good but needs changes

App is nice for the convenience of not needing to sign in like you would with the website. The setup is ok except for one thing that really needs to change is when you look at one vehicle listing and want to go back to the other listings, the “ All results” option is very close to the car gurus home page option and i quite often accidentally press that instead of the All results and it causes me to go back to the homepage and I have no way of getting back to where I was searching. Causes me a lot of frustration when I have many filters picked. I know I have the option to save my filters but sometimes I forget to do that. Another thing which has to do with the filters is how the filters options always changes depending on what you search for or how you search. For example when you want to search by body style it doesn’t allow you to put in the price. You have to search by price first then pick the body style but then you lose other filter options. I still will continue to use the app however I hope to see some improvements in the near future.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for telling us. We’re always trying to improve our experience. Please feel free to submit this and any other comments to feedback@cargurus.com.

No visibility into all fees, no quality assurance

The problem I’m about to describe is not unique to CarGurus. It applies to the whole genre of used car apps. If CarGurus wants to stand out, they should consider addressing the following:

I’ve been looking for a few months for a used car and sometimes the ‘good’ or ‘great’ deals on these apps are misleading. Just spoke with a dealer about a used car that appeared to be $1600 below market on a couple car apps. It was flagged as a “Good Deal.” They don’t mention on the app what I was only able to find out when I pressed the sales guy for details: there’s a $700 dealer fee, a $400 fee to process registration, and a $750 penalty for paying cash. The dealers are smart and have figured out how to game these apps to attract potential buyers with “Good Deals” and hopefully keep the fees hidden until the buyer is hooked on making the purchase. It’s frustrating and a fundamental flaw with these apps. The solution to this problem seems simple: require the dealers to list all fees along with the list price of the car, and factor those fees into the deal rating. Only then can a real comparison be done.

Developer Response ,

Hi there. Please note that we do not allow dealers to advertise prices contingent on down payments, financing or limited incentives. Please feel free to reach out to user_support@cargurus.com with the dealer you are referring to and we can take a closer look!