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Hey everyone,
Our Market Pulse each week is your guide to auto retail. This week, we looked at the most desired brands for dealers to own.
Dive in and find out which brands landed on top.
— CDG
First time reading a CDG Newsletter?
Welcome to The Weekly, a roundup of the top five auto industry headlines of the week.
Car buyers still trust the dealership model, but price is beating brand loyalty now, study finds
Urban Science's latest Harris Poll study shows vehicle buyers are taking a more deliberate, digitally-driven path to purchase, underscoring the need for dealerships and automakers to adapt their sales, marketing, and customer engagement strategies.
The details: The report, A New Route to the Dealership: How Buyers Shop and Dealers Sell in Today's Automotive Market, found consumers are spending more time researching while placing greater emphasis on value over brand loyalty as economic pressures reshape buying behavior.
The study also found confidence in the traditional dealership model remains relatively strong, with nearly two-thirds (63%) of dealers believing the business model is optimized for the future and buyer confidence in dealerships rising to 42%. Still, there are significant opportunities for improvement.
Preston Automotive’s transparent pricing process scales to multiple stores
About nine months ago, JB Burnett, executive general manager at Preston Automotive Group, with dealerships in five states, including Delaware and Maryland, introduced AutoFi and iPads at one of the group’s newly relocated Ford stores.
By January of this year, Burnett said the store had increased its PVR from about $1,600 a car to an average of $2,100 per car, a stat he shared during his segment of Daily Dealer Live.
And now, in July: He says they’ve scaled the process to more stores, averaging about one new add a quarter. Front-end gross, which climbed from about $1,700 to as high as $2,500, has leveled out at that stronger range. And that F&I gross has held between $1,600 and $2,100-plus.
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Fixed ops and used cars power Honda Marysville’s ‘surprisingly good’ July
Jeff Pister, executive manager at Honda Marysville in Ohio, said fixed operations and a large used-car business are driving surprisingly good results in July, even as Honda's new car inventory stays tight.
"Our focus on fixed operations - we've been really focused on that all year long: Growing it, with more capacity, more availability, and more flexibility with hours has helped us tremendously," Pister told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D’Arc.
For context: About a year ago, Pister rebuilt the service tech schedule, centered around flexibility. The shop now runs from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Monday through Friday, plus a full Saturday. Plus, their technicians work overlapping four-day schedules, which allows the store to cover a wider stretch of the day than a traditional five-day staff could.
Used sales drop 1.6% as prices hit 3-year high
Used vehicle sales dropped a slight 1.6% in June, while prices were up 6% year-over-year, according to data from Cox Automotive.
Driving the news: Used retail sales started a slowing trend after a busy spring tax season in the data from Cox Automotive’s vAuto.
The numbers show that, following a slight rebound in May, June sales fell 1.9% month over month to less than 1.4 million for the first time since February.
Toyota tops ACSI as luxury brands lose customer satisfaction edge
Toyota has pulled ahead in customer satisfaction, while luxury brands no longer hold an advantage over mass-market automakers, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
The details: The 2026 ACSI study found customer satisfaction in the luxury segment fell 3% to a score of 78 (on a 100-point scale), matching the mass-market segment, which slipped 1% to 78 as affordability pressure intensifies.
Penske Corp. and Mitsu move to take Penske Automotive Group private in $3.8B deal
