Service revenue is up. Dealer share is down.
Average dealer service and parts revenue grew from $6.95M in 2018 to $9.23M in 2025 — a 33% lift. The pie got bigger. Vehicles in operation grew 7% over the same period (279.1M to 298.7M). The number of independent shops competing for that work grew 12% (266K businesses to 299K).
The dealer's slice of that pie shrank.
Dealer share of total service visits in 2025 — down four points from 33% in 2018.
Average dealer service revenue growth 2018–2025. The revenue is there — but a smaller percentage of it is yours.
Most of the alternative providers picked up share, but no single competitor took it cleanly. General Repair grew 27% → 27%, Quick Lube 12% → 14%, Tire Stores held at 10–12%. The four-point dealership loss was distributed across them. Which means recovering it isn't a battle against one competitor — it's eleven retention motions running against every customer's decision to look elsewhere.
The under-2-year cliff.
Cox cuts the data three ways: vehicles under two years old, two-to-five years old, and over five years old. Dealerships perform best on the newest vehicles — but that's also where the largest decline since 2018 lives.
Dealer share of service visits for vehicles under two years old in 2018. The new-vehicle owner came back to the dealership.
That same number in 2025 — a 13-point drop in seven years. Convenience and competition cut into a segment dealerships used to own.
The stricter cut on this is loyalty to the dealership of purchase specifically. Among customers who serviced their vehicle at any dealership, only 54% returned to the one they bought from for under-2-year vehicles. In 2018 that number was 72%. An 18-point drop in seven years is the loudest signal in the report.
Convenience trumps loyalty.
Cox asked customers who didn't return to their dealership of purchase why they made the switch. The top five reasons, ranked:
- Convenience. Not a convenient location. Number one for the second study running.
- Value perception. "They will overcharge me." Note this is perception, not measured price.
- Total cost is not reasonable. Same perception, framed as the bill.
- Unreasonable labor charges.
- Unreasonable parts charges.
Four of the top five are about price perception. The other one is about location. Neither is really about the work itself — Cox finds 88% of dealership customers got their vehicle back in the time promised. Dealership NPS spiked to 59 in 2024 but reversed back to 47 in 2025 (per CDK's Service Shopper 5.0), making the perception gap a stickier problem to solve.
Dealerships are cheaper than general repair, on average.
This is the data point that catches dealer principals in every demo. Cox's 2025 study reports the average customer spend by service provider:
Average customer-pay spend at the dealership in 2025.
Average customer-pay spend at the independent repair shop. $14 higher than the dealer they walked past.
And when Cox holds price equal between dealer and general repair, customer preference flips toward the dealer: 45% prefer the dealership at the same price, versus 32% for general repair and 23% with no preference.
Which means the convenience-and-cost story isn't true on the receipt. It's true in the impression — the customer's belief about cost, formed before they call. That impression is fixable. The eleven retention motions AutoEngage runs are designed to fix it: prepaid maintenance reminders, complimentary first/second service callouts, declined-service price-match offers, transparent estimates inside the conversation.
Service is the front door to repurchase.
The service department isn't just a P&L center — it's the leading indicator on whether the customer buys their next vehicle from you. Cox quantifies it:
Of customers who returned to the dealership for service in the past 12 months are likely to repurchase from that dealership.
Of customers who lapsed on service are likely to repurchase. A 30-point gap on the same scale.
CDK's Service Shopper 5.0 confirms it from the other angle: 76% of dealership service customers had their vehicle serviced at the same dealership where they purchased it — down from 78% the prior year, and slipping fastest among Gen X (80% → 75%) and Old Millennials (83% → 80%). The customer who keeps coming back for service is the customer who buys their next car from you. The customer who drifts to general repair is the customer the next dealer is about to win.
This is why the <2-year defection cliff matters more than the headline four-point drop. Lose them in service in years one and two, and you don't just lose the ROs — you lose the next sale, the next F&I, and the next service cycle on the next vehicle.
Plug the leak in the first two years.
The Cox study lays out the implications clearly: empower customers to schedule, track, and approve work digitally; embrace mobile and pickup/delivery options; integrate service, inventory, and trade-in tools. All of that comes back to one capability: be in conversation with the customer at every retention moment, before they think to look elsewhere.
AutoEngage's branded SMS assistant runs eleven retention motions across the service lifecycle — scheduled service, OEM benefit redemption, declined-service recovery, recalls, telematics alerts, state inspections, and the inbound surfaces customers use to reach you — every customer, every motion, 24/7. It's how dealerships keep the under-2-year customer from making the drift to general repair in the first place.
The math on what closing that gap is worth lives in our ROI & first-2-year recapture calculator. Plug in your rooftops, your average customer-pay RO, and your new-vehicle volume, and the calculator sizes the opportunity using the Cox baselines on this page.