What Makes a Good Car Dealer, According to Past Buyers

A good car dealer has lots of public reviews, a high star average and very few angry buyers, and that last part matters most.

What We Graded

Our dealer directory lists 40,276 car dealers across 109 metros, as of September 2026. Every one of them is listed. Only 20,253 of them have a grade.

The reason is simple. A grade needs at least 20 public reviews. A dealer with five reviews could be great or awful, and five people is not enough to tell. So those dealers show up in the list with no grade at all. That is not a mark against them. It just means past buyers have not said much yet.

Each grade is a summary of what past buyers said. It is not an inspection of any car, and it is not a promise about your deal.

How the Grade Works

We look at two things. The first is an adjusted rating. We take the star average and pull it toward the national average of 4.3 by adding 25 extra average reviews. That way a perfect score from a handful of people cannot beat a 4.8 from thousands.

The second is the complaint share. That is the one and two star reviews as a share of all reviews.

• A means an adjusted 4.6 or higher, complaints of 8 percent or less, and at least 50 reviews.
• B means an adjusted 4.2 or higher and complaints of 15 percent or less.
• C means an adjusted 3.6 or higher and complaints of 25 percent or less.
• F is everything else. There is no D.

The full method is on our grading page.

The Grade Mix

Most graded dealers do fine. 22 percent earn an A, 40 percent earn a B, 22 percent earn a C, and 16 percent get an F.

That means 62 percent land in the top two grades. If you only shop A and B dealers, you still have plenty of choice in most cities. You do not have to settle for a lot with a long list of angry buyers.

A C is not a stop sign. It often means a dealer does most deals well but has a steady trickle of unhappy buyers. An F is different. It means the complaints are frequent, the rating is low, or both. Go in with your eyes open, read the worst reviews, and do not skip any of the checks below.

A Dealers Next to F Dealers

The gap between the top and the bottom is wide. A dealers average 4.8 stars. F dealers average 3.4. That may not sound like much on a five star scale, but it is a big gap in how buyers feel.

The complaint share tells the story better. Only 4 percent of reviews for A dealers are one or two stars. For F dealers it is 37 percent. That is a lot of people who walked away unhappy.

Review count differs too. The typical A dealer has 299 reviews. The typical F dealer has 52. A dealers tend to have more buyers speaking up, so their record rests on more people.

What Good Dealers Seem to Share

When we read what buyers say about top graded dealers, a few things come up again and again.

• Buyers say they felt no pressure to sign that day.
• The price on the car was the price at the desk.
• Staff answered questions in a straight way.
• Problems after the sale got fixed, not ignored.

None of this is magic. It is the basic stuff that makes a buyer trust a lot. The bad dealers tend to fail at the same basic stuff, and buyers say so. Our piece on the review words that separate good and bad dealers goes deeper.

What This Means for You

Start with the grade, but do not stop there. Look at how many reviews a dealer has. Read the worst ones. Check the dates. A grade tells you how past buyers felt. It cannot tell you about the one car you want.

Even the best dealer sells cars it did not build and may not know well. A trade in can look clean and still hide a problem. A good dealer will let you get the car checked. A dealer who pushes back on that is telling you something.

Get the Car Checked Too

A great grade lowers your odds of a bad deal. It does not make the car sound. Our used car inspection is a 122 point check with a full OBD-II scan, a road test, tire and brake measurements, and photos of anything we find. We go to the car, you do not need to be there, and the report comes the same day.

Common Questions

Get the Car Inspected