Wonder

Research Outline

Prepared for Lei T. | Delivered March 26, 2020

Car Dealers Statistics

Goals

To determine the % of car owners that buy new vehicles from frnachised dealers and the % of car owners that buy used vehicles from franchised dealers, with a focus on 

Early Findings

There were a total of 57.4 million cars sold in the US in 2018. Of those 40.2 million were used cars while 17.2 million were new cars.
According to NADA data, almost all of the new car sales were done by franchised dealers (17.2 million) while used cars were sold through different channels, including franchised dealerships, independent used vehicle dealers, and private transactions.
Unfortunately, we could not identify a recent number for the amount of used cars sold by franchised dealers, we found that, in 2016, there were 14,968,206 used and factory certified vehicles that were sold by franchised dealers.
Moreover, according to JD Power, the ratio between the number of sales of new to used vehicles amounted to 0.87 in franchised dealerships in 2018. This means that there were roughly 14.98 million used vehicles sold by franchised dealerships in 2018.
As such, we have concluded that franchised dealership sell close to 100% of new cars but only about 37.26% (14.98 million / 40.2 million) from the total amount of used cars in the US.
There was also limited data on the aftersales channels used by customers that buy new and used cars. According to a report by V12, "75% of aftermarket auto repair is performed by independent auto repair shops, while 25% of the business lives with dealerships."
The total new-car sales for Toyota in 2019 amounted to 2,426,673 vehicles in the US. We can assume that all of them have been sold through their franchised dealers.
Honda sold 1,608,176 vehicles in the US for 2019 while Nissan sold 1,345,681 vehicles in 2019.
There was no data on the number of used cars sold by each of these brands, either in franchised dealership or in general.