Seventy-one percent of the drivers Caribou surveyed could not say whether their auto loan includes GAP coverage, and the same share did not know whether they are paying for a vehicle service contract. The auto-refinancing company’s poll put the question to people who already hold car loans, which makes the finding a statement about borrowers in the middle of a purchase they signed, not about every licensed driver on the road.
The survey reached 2,000 U.S. drivers with active auto loans, according to the consumer-finance outlet ConsumerAffairs, which describes the 71 percent as a share of borrowers. Caribou chief executive Simon Goodall framed the result as a blind spot: drivers can recite their monthly payment to the dollar, he said, but their APR, their coverage and what the loan actually costs sit outside what they track.
A sample of borrowers, not of every driver
The number sounds like a verdict on the whole driving public. Every respondent had a loan to forget about, and the question asked whether that loan carried protection products that are typically added in the finance office at signing. A driver who paid cash, or who owns a decade-old car outright, was never in the pool.
Autoblog, which reported the figures on October 10, 2026, wrote the result as “71% of drivers” and attributed it to Caribou by way of an Automotive News story. Neither report publishes field dates or says which firm ran the questionnaire, and a search of Caribou’s newsroom turned up the company’s September and October industry-insight posts but no release for this survey. The sample size and the borrower screen come from the ConsumerAffairs write-up; the rest of the methodology is not public in anything reviewed.
GAP coverage versus a repair plan
GAP, short for guaranteed asset protection, pays the difference between what a financed car is worth and what is still owed if the car is totaled or stolen. Standard insurance pays only the market value of the vehicle at the time of loss. A service contract is a separate product, a prepaid repair plan sold alongside the loan and often rolled into the amount financed.
The Federal Reserve’s FEDS working paper by Thomas Durkin, Gregory Elliehausen and Thomas Miller Jr., built on a 2020 University of Michigan survey of 1,206 people, found GAP in about 39 percent of financed vehicle transactions, and more than 90 percent of the buyers said they would purchase it again. That research describes people who knew they had bought it, which is the group Caribou’s result suggests may be smaller than the sales figures imply.
Insurance assumptions and the Gen Z gap
ConsumerAffairs reported that 38 percent of respondents wrongly believe ordinary auto insurance automatically covers the gap between a vehicle’s value and the loan balance. Autoblog added that nearly half of finalized auto loans include these add-on agreements, and that 43 percent of Gen Z respondents wrongly think standard insurance covers negative equity, the group it described as showing the widest confusion.
Seventy percent of respondents knew their exact monthly payment, but only 25 percent could recall their total interest, and 43 percent knew their APR. Thirty-eight percent said the interest they ended up paying was higher than they had expected.
Autoblog’s account also carries an anecdote from the other side of the desk: unnamed finance managers told the outlet that many buyers claim they already have coverage simply to end the sales presentation. If that habit is common, a buyer could decline a product while believing a policy elsewhere already covers the shortfall, or accept one and forget it within months.
Caribou’s stake in the finding
Caribou, formerly MotoRefi, connects car owners with lenders such as credit unions and community banks that may offer a lower rate, and the company has said its growth plan centers on refinancing. A survey showing that borrowers do not know what their loans contain supports the case for shopping a loan again, so the result comes from a firm with a product to sell, and its interest in the outcome is the first thing a reader should weigh before treating 71 percent as a neutral measurement of public knowledge about auto finance.
The company has run polls before. Its Car Loan Sentiment Survey, released on May 7, 2026, also polled 2,000 U.S. respondents with a car loan, fielded March 27 to April 1, and found 30 percent had struggled to make a payment on time in the prior 12 months. That is a different questionnaire from the GAP result, and the sources read do not say whether the two shared a respondent pool.
The open item is the one Caribou has not published: the fielding dates and questionnaire wording behind the 71 percent. Without them, a reader can say that 71 percent of 2,000 surveyed borrowers did not recall their coverage, as Autoblog and ConsumerAffairs report it, and not that the share holds for borrowers nationwide.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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