Car Wars, a provider of innovative phone solutions for automotive dealerships, has uncovered a significant shift in customer conversations. The mention of “tariffs” on dealership phone calls has increased nearly 4,000% when comparing the week of March 27, 2025, to just five weeks prior. While this is a remarkable increase, it’s important to note that tariff-related calls only represent 1.26% of total calls in this sample segment during the week of March 27.

Using Car Wars’ advanced large language models, Car Wars audited dealership phone calls with customer-facing transcriptions and discovered a spike in the instance of calls referencing tariffs – from 918 mentions the week of February 20, 2025, to 36,955 the week of March 27, 2025 – using a limited, yet representative, subset of calls into and out of dealerships. During the same timeframe, mentions of tariffs by dealership staff, as opposed to customer mentions, spiked more than 67x, signaling a massive acceleration in volume. Furthermore, in this representative segment, the percentage of total dealership calls mentioning tariffs increased from 0.03% to 1.26% - a noteworthy but small segment of total calls.

Dealership staff are driving much of the tariff conversations – mentioning it nearly twice as often as customers. Many are using it as a strategic tool to build urgency and get buyers into the showroom. While it might seem like customers are leading the conversation, Car Wars data shows it’s often the agent who brings it up first. Still, a 23x rise in customer mentions confirms there’s interest and concern on both sides of the call.

“This surge in tariff-related conversations is a clear signal dealers are proactively using timely market topics to engage buyers and drive them into the showroom,” said Stephane Ferri, chief executive officer at Car Wars. “Dealerships need to be prepared with informed answers and strong phone processes to turn uncertainty into opportunity.”