FTC's 2018 compliance sweep found a Buyers Guide on 70 percent of vehicles inspected - multiplied out, the required revised version was on about a third

If you buy a used car from a dealer in the United States, the form taped in the window is part of what you sign. The Used Motor Vehicle Trade Regulation Rule says so in its own text. As published in the 2023 annual edition of 16 CFR Part 455, the rule puts this in front of the buyer: "The information you see on the window form for this vehicle is part of this contract. Information on the window form overrides any contrary provisions in the contract of sale."

The part of that form most people remember is the box marked AS IS - NO DEALER WARRANTY. The Federal Trade Commission's 2016 final rule records that the statement has been on the Buyers Guide since the rule was promulgated in 1984, and that the rule became effective in 1985. The source credit printed under Part 455 in the 2023 annual edition still opens at 49 FR 45725, Nov. 19, 1984, and lists three amendments in four decades: December 1995, December 2012 and November 2016.

The claim

In July 2018 the Commission published the results of a compliance sweep run after the deadline for the updated version of that form - the first under the newly amended rule, per the release's title as filed in this piece's source record. The requirement is stated flatly: "as of January 28, 2018, dealers are required to display a revised Buyers Guide on all used vehicles they offer for sale." The release attaches a price to ignoring it - up to $41,484 per violation. That figure is the one published in July 2018.

No official is named anywhere in the captured text of that release. The requirement, the penalty and the sweep results all arrive in the agency's institutional voice, with no quotation attributed to a person. The sweep is credited to the FTC and partner agencies by the release's title as filed in this piece's source record; the captured body carries no such credit line.

What the 2016 amendment changed

The Commission's November 2016 announcement records the vote to publish the notice of final rule in the Federal Register as 3-0. The final rule text states that the rule is effective on January 27, 2017. The Commission's own question-and-answer page for dealers, describing the same amendment, refers instead to the January 28, 2017 effective date - a one-day discrepancy sitting inside the agency's own documents.

Both documents reach the same deadline. The final rule let dealers run out existing stock of Buyers Guides for up to a year after the amendments took effect, and the dealer FAQ tells them the new guide had to be in use by January 28, 2018. The amended guide states that the dealer provides no warranty for any repairs after sale, and the rulemaking reasons that simplifying the description of an as-is sale to one where the dealer does not provide a warranty should reduce the chance of consumer confusion - a change the rulemaking's own wording frames as one of description.

The record

Six months past the deadline, the sweep produced this count: "The inspectors found Buyers Guides on 70 percent of the more than 2,300 vehicles inspected, with almost half of those displaying the revised Buyers Guide."

Multiply it out, which the captured text does not. Seventy percent carried a guide of some vintage; slightly under half of those carried the revised one. That is roughly a third of more than 2,300 inspected vehicles displaying the form the Commission had described as required six months earlier, on a rule in force since the mid-1980s. That product appears nowhere in the captured text.

Two finer-grained counts are thinner than they first read. The captured sentence reports 33 with the revised guide on more than half their vehicles and 14 with it on all their used cars, but the sentence as captured names neither the units being counted - dealerships is a reading the capture leaves implicit - nor the population they come out of. Both arrive without a denominator, so no share of full compliance can be computed from this capture.

What the box means, depending on who is being addressed

In the rulemaking the Commission is careful. It writes that the as-is statement carries no meaning beyond the dealer's intention not to fund post-sale warranty repairs, and then goes further: "The fact that the dealer does not provide a warranty does not foreclose the possibility that a dealer could have post-sale repair obligations in some circumstances."

The statement is intended to convey nothing more than that the dealer does not intend to provide post-sale repairs under a warranty.

The rulemaking also notes that the Uniform Commercial Code identifies using as is as a method of disclaiming implied warranties, and the agency's business guidance says plainly that the effect varies by jurisdiction: the dealer's guide states that in some states the as-is box may be legally sufficient to eliminate implied warranties, while other states allow such sales only where specific steps are taken or particular wording is used. The dealer FAQ puts the same point in one sentence: "Whether you are permitted to sell a used vehicle 'As Is' (in other words, without any warranty, including implied warranties) is governed by state law."

On the consumer side, the capture is thinner. The captured line from the agency's page for used-car buyers reads "means the dealer won't pay for any problems or needed repairs" - a fragment whose subject did not survive extraction, so what it describes cannot be fixed from this capture. As analysis, and scoped to the captured texts: the regulator hedges when writing to the businesses it regulates, while the one line captured from its consumer page carries no qualifier at all.

What a buyer can actually do with this

The usable instruction in the record is narrow. Anything negotiated about warranty coverage has to be written onto the form, not just agreed across the desk. The consumer page states: "The Buyers Guide must show any changes you negotiate in the warranty coverage. It will override anything in your sales contract." Read the box, get any promise onto the guide, keep the guide.

What this piece could check, and could not: every figure here comes from the captured excerpts of Federal Trade Commission and Federal Register documents listed in the ledger. Those excerpts are partial, so every statement about what a document does not say is scoped to the captured text rather than the whole page. The Buyers Guide form itself could not be read as text here, so nothing above describes its layout. The Part 455 text quoted is the 2023 annual edition and may have been amended since. The Commission was not asked for comment; this piece rests on its published records.

The next checkable item is one the agency set itself. The July 2018 release states that dealerships found without the revised guide can expect follow-up inspections to confirm they have come into compliance. Those follow-up results are the thing to watch for. A falsifiable call from this desk: by December 31, 2026, the Commission will not have published a follow-up sweep reporting compliance rates from those return visits the way the July 2018 release reported the first ones. If it does publish them, the number to hold the new figure against is the one the captured 2018 release never computed - about a third.