The question

Every car dealership runs on software it does not own.

Names, addresses, financing files, driver’s license images — a dealership collects all of it to sell and finance a car, and most of it lands in systems built and operated by somebody else.

So what can a dealership actually check about those companies?

We assessed 147 vendor brands, operated by 126 independent companies, across ten categories of dealership software. Nine signals each. Published, or not.

No surveys. No questionnaires. Nothing anybody had to answer. Only what each vendor already puts on its own public pages — the same things any customer could look up unaided.

The full study publishes in October 2026.