On July 16th Pied Piper, a marketing consultant group based in Pacific Grove, CA, released the results of a customer satisfaction survey designed to measure how prospective car buyers felt they were treated in dealership showrooms. The top three companies were Acura (Honda's luxury line), Land Rover, which is one of the Ford Motor Company's marques, and GM's Saturn.

Study author, and Pied Piper president Fran O'Hagan said, "The dealerships that scored well all give customers a reason to be interested other than the deal." Her study used a combination of polling actual car shoppers at almost sixteen hundred different auto dealers, as well as information from paid researchers pretending to shop for cars.

In fact, it was the luxury brands and European imports that demonstrated this best, as five other brands among the top ten were Audi, BMW, Nissan, Saab (another GM brand), and Volkswagen, while brands like Toyota, which has been working to actively address complaints of customer neglect and pushy sales staff, especially where financing information and feature packages are concerned, and Honda both came out with scores of "average."

The study, which also determined that 30 percent of shoppers do not buy a car on the same day they first look, also ranked 12 companies as below average. Among them were Detroit's Big Three: Chevrolet, Ford and Chrysler.