Each year, Reputation’s Automotive Rankings Report compares the performance of auto brands and dealers across the industry.
Rankings are based on Reputation Score, which reflects how customers experience, trust, and engage with automotive businesses across the buying journey.
We looked at the top and bottom 25% to identify where lower-tier performers get stuck – and what top-tier brands and dealers do best. Here’s what we found:
Where the Lower Tier Fails
Pricing pitfalls
Pricing is one of the most common sources of negative feedback among low-tier performers. That’s often because “pricing” can mean different things: transparency, perceived value, unexpected fees, etc.
Top performers typically use a reputation system that examines customer language in detail and pinpoints exactly what people are reacting to. Organizations without that capability often respond at a surface level, making broad changes that don’t resolve the real issue. As a result, pricing complaints repeat and scores don’t improve.
Service struggles
Service-related problems consistently drag down sentiment for low-tier locations. These issues rarely happen everywhere at once. They tend to surface at specific points in the customer journey – before the visit, during service, or after delivery.
Without clarity on where the experience breaks, teams fix the wrong part of the process. Top-tier performers use systems that clearly show which stage of the journey is failing, so effort goes into the right fix. When that visibility is missing, service complaints repeat and trust erodes.
Finance friction
Finance remains a sensitive stage of the automotive experience. Feedback in this area is often detailed, emotional, and highly influential in overall perception.
Top performers use AI to analyze feedback at scale to identify recurring patterns and predict outcomes. Lower-tier performers that lack AI-first tools are more likely to treat issues as isolated incidents, making improvement slow, inconsistent, and difficult to sustain across locations.
Where the Top Tier Excels
More reviews
Top-tier brands and dealerships consistently generate far more customer reviews across their locations than lower-tier peers. The difference is large enough to materially separate leaders from laggards in overall Reputation Score.
High review volume creates a fuller, more trustworthy picture of the customer experience. It gives buyers greater confidence in what they see, and greater trust in the brand they’re considering.
Consistent responses
Top-tier performers treat review responses as a standard operating practice, not an occasional task. Their consistency clearly exceeds that of lower-tier locations.
Where low-tier performers often use basic review management systems or time-consuming manual processes to respond to reviews, top-tier brands tend to leverage top-tier platforms that automate responses, while ensuring voice-of-brand consistency.
Fresh feedback & listings
Leading brands and dealers maintain a steady flow of recent reviews rather than relying on reputation built years ago. And they keep their business listings fresh.
Across the rankings, locations with consistently recent feedback and up-to-date listings outperform those with similar ratings but stale review activity and listings, reinforcing the importance of staying current in the eyes of buyers.
The Takeaway
Top-tier automotive brands and dealers don’t guess at what customers want or where problems exist. They build a clear understanding of customer feedback across the journey and act on it consistently.
Reputation Score is the visible result of doing this well – reflecting not just perception, but disciplined execution at scale.
