Top 10 Providence Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in RI

Providence, RI, known as the “Creative Capital,” is a city rich in history, arts, and academia. As the home of institutions like Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence has long fostered a vibrant creative and intellectual community.

Providence is also a city of close-knit neighborhoods, historic architecture, and waterfront views along Narragansett Bay. Residents and visitors alike enjoy popular attractions such as WaterFire, the acclaimed Trinity Repertory Company, and the Roger Williams Park Zoo.

With a strong emphasis on sustainability and walkability, Providence has a unique car market shaped by urban needs. Compact cars, hybrids, and electric vehicles are in high demand for navigating the city’s historic streets, while an increasing interest in eco-friendly transportation has spurred a growing EV market. Providence’s car dealerships emphasize convenience, online presence, and reputation to stand out in this evolving, tech-savvy market.

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

• Nucar Hyundai of North Kingstown leads the overall category amongst dealerships in Providence. Like most dealerships on this list, it performs strongly across all four reputation categories. To extend its narrow lead, this dealer should work to maintain its high monthly review volume, which will in turn work to increase its relative review volume. 
• Balise Toyota of Warwick secures the number five spot on the list. It is one of the strongest dealerships in terms of review volume with an average response rate. Continuing to ask for reviews and taking the time to analyze them for any pain points in customer experience would certainly help improve its local ranking here. Further, partnering with an online reputation management expert like Widewail, who can help identify customer pain points through review analysis, is always an option to consider when looking to improve.

• BMW of Warwick is the clear leader of the local luxury car dealers in and around Providence. Trailing just behind BMW of Warwick, however, is BMW of Newport. In the short term, this dealer should focus on improving its review response rate. At just under 94%, this dealership could easily close the gap with the top luxury dealer by responding to every review.
• The only thing keeping Tasca Buick GMC Woonsocket in the top ten is its review volume. With a low adjusted star rating and response rate of just 87%, this dealership has a clear path to bolstering its reputation score. Addressing pain points for its customers and responding to more reviews would certainly see Tasca Buick GMC Woonsocket work its way up this list.

• The lowest response rate of the non-luxury bunch—just 90%—is that of Tasca Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Johnston, which sits in the #8 spot on this list. Response rate is the easiest of the four categories for dealers to address. By engaging with more reviews, this dealer will see an improvement not just in its ranking here, but in its overall SEO health as well.
• The #9 position is held by Anchor Nissan. A perfect 100% response rate is not enough to make up for Anchor Nissan’s poor review volume. Exploring new ways to get more reviews coming in would certainly see this dealership start to climb the ranks. 
  
  
  

*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.