New York City, the bustling metropolis known as “The Big Apple,” is the most populous and influential city in the United States. Known for its beautiful skyline, financial district, and diverse culture, it's hard to imagine the bustling streets of the city as a site for automotive manufacturing.
In the early 19th century, New York City was home to more than 50 different automotive manufacturers. While no longer a large manufacturing hub, the largest city in the US has a thriving automotive dealer market.
In New York, dealerships showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. To earn the best reputation in New York, dealers must provide top-notch service and demonstrate an active commitment to the customer experience.
Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate, we’ve identified the New York dealerships with the best online reputations.
- Victory Mitsubishi earns the top-ranking spot in NYC, with an overall reputation health score of 94. The dealer achieves this by having a perfect review response rate while vastly outperforming in relative lifetime review volume.
- Following closely behind at #2 is Mercedes-Benz Manhattan, which has the highest relative monthly review volume. The dealer could snag the #1 spot on the list if it continues to lead in monthly review volume and improves its review response rate.
- Island Kia ranks #10, even with a perfect review response rate. This dealer should focus on increasing its monthly review volume to rise in the rankings, as active review solicitation is one of the most effective ways to improve your online reputation.
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Mercedes-Benz Manhattan secures the #1 spot of the top luxury dealers in NYC with a nearly perfect overall reputation health score of 97. The dealer also outperforms in monthly and lifetime volumes, as well as adjusted rating.
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The rest of the luxury dealers are fairly competitive with only 8 points separating the health scores of the #3 dealer (BMW of Brooklyn Sales) and the #10 dealer (Empire Buick GMC of Long Island City.) With health scores of 69 and 61, respectively, both dealers should work on increasing monthly review volumes to break away from the pack.
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Jaguar Manhattan, #8 on the top luxury dealer list, has the lowest response rate of all dealers. It could easily rise in the rankings with a more robust review response strategy.
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Victory Mitsubishi stands out from the pack and secures the #1 spot for non-luxury dealers in NYC. With a health score of 96, this dealer outperforms its competitors for review response rate and monthly and lifetime review volume.
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The #2 dealer, Hillside Toyota, trails behind with a health score of 81. This dealer will need to increase its monthly and lifetime review volumes to increase its reputation and surpass Victory Mitsubishi as the top non-luxury dealer in NYC.
*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 takes into account 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 simply 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.
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Lifetime Volume
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Scaled Volume
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4619
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1
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4065
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0.88
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3922
|
0.85
|
|
1783
|
0.38
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|
1001
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0.21
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|
810
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0.17
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|
164
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0.03
|
|
101
|
0.02
|
|
22
|
0
|
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%)
The rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local search 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.
