Top 10 Kansas City Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in MO

Kansas City, MO, has a rich automotive history spanning over a century.

In the early 1900s, the city's automotive industry flourished as demand for automobiles grew, leading to the establishment of numerous local manufacturers. A key milestone for Kansas City occurred in 1913 when Henry Ford opened an assembly plant—the company’s first facility outside Detroit.

Over the years, Kansas City has hosted a diverse range of automotive companies, from industry giants to smaller, innovative manufacturers. The city's strategic location, skilled workforce, and strong infrastructure have made it a prime location for automotive production.

Today, Kansas City remains a vital player in the automotive industry, with major assembly plants and a robust network of suppliers. The city also celebrates its automotive legacy through attractions like the Kansas City Automotive Museum and various community events.

Dealerships in the Kansas City area showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. To earn the best reputation in Kansas City, dealers must provide top-notch service while actively soliciting customer reviews. 

Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate, we’ve identified the Kansas City dealerships with the best online reputations. 

• Molle Toyota has the best online reputation out of all dealerships in the Kansas City area. This dealer is committed to the customer experience, which is demonstrated by its high monthly review volume, response rate, and adjusted star rating. To maintain the first place spot and avoid being overtaken by the close second place dealer, Lee’s Summit Honda, Molle Toyota needs to continue its review generation efforts. By frequently and consistently bringing in more reviews, this dealer maintains its search visibility and relevance, making it the #1 choice to prospects in the Kansas City Area.  
• Each of the top 10 dealers in Kansas City does a good job managing its online reputation. Each has a high review response rate and adjusted star rating. Where the dealers start to differ is in review volume, both overall and monthly. To secure a top reputation spot in Kansas City, dealers must actively work to generate new and fresh review content. Those that do will rank higher in the local search pack while building a sense of credibility and trust for their brands. 

• Hendrick Lexus Kansas City North secures the top spot out of all luxury dealerships in Kansas City. Boasting a nearly perfect reputation health score, this dealer is certainly committed to delivering a positive customer experience.
• Trailing 10 points behind Hendrick Lexus Kansas City North in second place is BMW of Kansas City South. This dealer, while rivaling Hendrick Lexus Kansas City North in terms of adjusted star rating and lifetime volume, lacks in review response rate and monthly review volume. Generating new review content and taking the time to respond to every review would improve this dealer’s online reputation.
• Coming in last place for luxury dealers is Mercedes-Benz of Kansas City South. This dealer has a high adjusted star rating and review response rate, signaling that they do respond to and engage with reviews. However, this dealer’s low monthly and relative review volumes signal they don’t have a review generation strategy in place. To build a strong reputation you need to connect with your customer base—you need reviews. To improve its reputation score, Mercedes-Benz of Kansas City South needs to boost its review volume.
  
  

• Ranking first among non-luxury dealers is Molle Toyota. This dealer has a near-perfect review response rate and a very high monthly review volume, propelling it to the top spot. 
  -Many of the dealerships ranked here are also featured in the overall rankings list. This demonstrates that Kansas City’s non-luxury dealerships are strongly committed to building and maintaining their online reputations.
• Rob Sight Ford, in 10th place, is competitive when it comes to review response rate and adjusted star rating. However, it lacks lifetime review volume. Customers are less likely to choose your business if you don’t have a wealth of reviews showcasing your service/products. To rise in the reputation ranking, this dealer needs to take advantage of every available review opportunity to increase overall review volume. 
  
  

*Note from the editor. The Automotive Reputation Index offers substantial coverage of the nation’s dealerships, but it’s still growing. If your dealership is not yet listed on the Index and you’d like to add it, submit your information and we will add it during a regularly scheduled update, roughly once per month.

Widewail's rankings are based on the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index. Explore the full dataset:

Ranking Methodology

To rank these dealerships fairly, we chose a method that considers the fact that dealerships on our list receive a wide range of monthly review volume, in part due to varying levels of opportunity. For example, luxury brands can never sell as many cars as non-luxury brands, the price point limiting a luxury dealership's market.

To compare two dealerships with very different review volumes directly wouldn’t be fair. A dealer with two 5-star reviews doesn’t necessarily deserve to be ranked higher than a dealer with 200 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. With few reviews, the former doesn’t offer enough data for us to use to understand its performance. However, we couldn’t just ignore locations with very few reviews, as that would introduce bias into our rankings.

To solve this, we used "adjusted ratings" in our calculation of dealership ranking. In essence, "adjusted rating" is a dealership's star rating that takes into account how its review volume compares to that of other dealerships in that area. We calculated adjusted ratings by using a technique called additive smoothing which we explain below.

Additive Smoothing

The approach we’ve used is a form of what’s called “additive smoothing.” This process allows for an unbiased way to rank two otherwise unequal dealerships. At its core, additive smoothing levels the playing field by artificially increasing the number of reviews each dealership has by adding the same number of reviews of each star rating to every dealership.

Customer Engagement

Additionally, we take into account the percentage of reviews that a dealership has responded to in our calculation of ranking, as Widewail strongly believes that review response is indicative of a strong reputation strategy.

Activity

The last component revolves around how much review volume a dealership receives, which can be broken down into two parts - their lifetime volume and average monthly volume. Lifetime volume can be thought of as a popularity metric. It’s an important metric and one of the first numbers that a potential customer will see when they start looking at reviews. The second, average monthly review volume, is representative of how active the dealership currently is. We can think of it as follows, lifetime volume captures a historical view of the dealership whereas average volume gives insight into the current status. The final component for the volume metrics is to scale them so there is a more meaningful comparison. To do this we use what is known as min-max scaling. First we group dealerships by their respective city and then find the dealership with the most volume and least volume. Then for each dealer in the group, we subtract the lowest volume and divide by the difference between the highest and lowest volume. The formula for this can be seen below.  

x' = x - min(x)max(x) - min(x)

The main advantages of this approach are that all the volume metrics can be mapped to a value between 0 and 1 and the relative difference between dealership volumes can still be preserved. 

Below we see an example of this where we have 9 dealerships with differing lifetime volumes, which we then scale. Notice that the relative distance between the actual volumes and the scaled versions is the same. 

Below we have an example of ten dealerships, their review volume, and the adjusted relative volume. We can calculate the relative volume by sorting the dealers by review volume and determining the percentage of dealers that have fewer reviews. Here we see that dealer D had the most reviews and so they get a score of 1.  

The Ranking Formula

(adjusted rating / 5) * 0.3 + (response rate) * 0.3 + (lifetime volume) * 0.15 + (avg monthly volume) * 0.25

Weighting Rational

We chose to weigh each feature as follows: adjusted rating accounts for 30% of the overall score, response rate also accounts for 30%, and review volume is 40%, which is further broken down into lifetime volume (15%) and average monthly volume (25%).

Weight selection is based on Widewail’s depth of expertise in the industry and we believe is a fair representation of what should be considered a standout reputation. 

We’ve broken the weighs into three categories:

Activity (40%)

We believe the amount of review activity is the most important indicator of reputation health for a business, and is a leading driver of local search rankings. We’ve broken this category into two components: lifetime volume (15%) and frequency (25%). Lifetime volume is our “popularity” metric. 

Engagement (30%)

Engaging with customers by responding to reviews is a key component of a healthy reputation.

Quality (30%)

Rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local searches and if that business is entered into a prospect’s consideration set. Rating is a key identifier of business health.

Calculation Details

If a company has an adjusted rating of 4.2, responds to 10% of their reviews and has an adjusted lifetime volume of 0.90 in their city and 0.87 for their scaled average monthly review volume, then we would calculate their overall rating as follows

(4.2 / 5) * 0.3 + (0.1)*0.3 + (0.9)*0.15 + (0.87)*0.25 = 0.252 + 0.03 + 0.135 + 0.2175 = 0.6345 * 100 = 63.45

Note: Since response rate accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, if a dealer doesn’t respond to any reviews that automatically caps the max value they can receive to 70.