By Curtis Knievel
Cars are in my blood. My family had dealerships including those that sold European and Japanese imports in the Pacific Northwest, which eventually became Knievel Imports. Yes, that Knievel. Evel is my uncle.
Growing up around cars and then spending more than two decades working with dealers, I’ve seen the business from every angle.
When I recently set out to buy a very specific vehicle — only one was available in the country, at a dealership in Seattle, while I’m in Southern California — I knew I was signing up for a remote deal. What I didn’t expect was to spend the better part of the transaction coaching the sales manager through their own process.
I bought the car, but it wasn’t easy. The friction I experienced wasn’t just inconvenient, it was a window into compliance gaps most consumers wouldn’t recognize but that dealers should absolutely heed.
Text message requests for licenses are not secure
We agreed on price over the phone, which was the easy part. Then came the paperwork and the first red flag.
The sales manager asked me to send a copy of my driver’s license and insurance card. Via text. To be fair, requesting those documents is standard; where the process broke down was how.
Sending a photo of your driver’s license over a standard text thread is not secure or compliant. It’s a Federal Trade Commission Safeguards Rule issue. I asked directly: Is this a secure, encrypted channel?
Silence. Thirty minutes later, the manager followed up with a link to a secure document collection tool and admitted it was the first time he’d used it.
They had the right technology. They just weren’t trained to use it, and there was nothing in place to make them. This is a large dealership group. That gap likely isn’t happening at one store; it’s happening every day, everywhere.
3 hard credit pulls can be costly
I came in preapproved through my credit union at a strong rate. Simple offer: Match or beat it, and the financing is yours. The dealership’s response? They needed to run a hard credit inquiry to find out if they could compete.
I told them I have an 850 credit score; they still ran all three bureaus. For a borrower at that tier, one bureau is more than sufficient. That’s not due diligence; it’s waste, and it’s a real, recurring cost because dealers pay for every pull. Pulling three when one would do — on every deal, on customers who buy and customers who don’t — adds up fast.
I asked about a soft pull. They didn’t have that option. We worked around it, they beat my rate, and the deal closed. But the unnecessary spend was entirely avoidable.
Fraud detection was nonexistent
Here’s the one that should concern every dealer principal reading this: At no point during the transaction did anything signal to me that fraud screening was part of their process. Not at the start, not in the middle and not at delivery. A driver showed up at my door, checked my license visually, handed over the keys and left.
I know what a fraud check looks like. It didn’t happen, at least not in any way that was part of a documented, consistent process.
For a remote deal involving a customer they’d never met on a vehicle worth a significant sum — that’s real exposure.
The process of selling cars hasn’t kept up
What struck me most wasn’t a single misstep; it was how familiar all of it felt. The auto industry calls the purchase journey “the road to the sale.” That road has looked roughly the same for decades. The problem is that the compliance requirements, fraud risks and consumer expectations surrounding it have changed dramatically. The process hasn’t kept up.
The systems most dealerships rely on today are disjointed. They weren’t built to work together, they don’t enforce consistent behavior, and they leave too much room for improvisation that creates liability.
Buying a car should be exciting — and always is for a car guy like me even when the process is clunky. Most buyers don’t know to ask about soft pulls, secure document channels or fraud verification. They just know something feels off.
The good news is the tools to fix all of this exist. The question is whether dealers are ready to use them.
Curtis Knievel is vice president of business development at Informativ, a fraud prevention, compliance tech and credit provider.