Does not make any sense to me at all. I would say that there is some invisible character in there but that would make the results more odd than what you’re seeing.
The only other thing I can think of is that there’s another filter being applied that you might be unaware of. I would try displaying all of the query after it’s run to see if there’s any arguments that should not be there.
$the_query = new WP_Query(array(
'post_type' => 'carsales',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'meta_key' => 'car_make',
'orderby' => 'meta_value',
'order' => 'DESC'
));
echo '<pre>'; print_r($the_query); echo '</pre>';
