Seven percent of Americans believe car salespeople have a high level of honesty and integrity, according to a recent annual poll by the Gallup Organization on professional ethics. Auto dealers scored the lowest of fields listed in the questionnaire, a fact little changed in 25 years of polling. Car retailers are far behind top-rated nurses, at 83 percent, and they even lag well behind members of Congress, lawyers and journalists.

The decision by many car dealers to display their code of ethics in showrooms isn't doing much to cure the industry's chronic ailment in the eyes of the public. The disease is sleaze--real or imagined--in showrooms and car lots nationwide. While the National Automobile Dealers Code of Ethics takes a stand against wrongdoing, it has no mechanism for penalizing it.

Leaders of the National Automobile Dealers Association dispute their critics, claiming that the NADA-authored ethics code was never intended as a cure-all for the reputation of their industry. Building public trust is a long-term effort, they say. In the shorter term, the association is taking additional steps to increase the benefits of the ethics code.

(April, 2004)