Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Mike Nolte · VinFast · August 2026
In a franchised model the buyer is an owner, not a driver. Consumer marketing reaches the second one and is silent about the first. This map covers where the owner seats sit across the US retail market, roughly how many there are, and the commercial door that does not need a store at all.
Franchised new-vehicle rooftops
The operating base of US retail and the pool every new franchise is recruited from. These are businesses with a facility, a service department and a trained staff already in place, which is why adding a line is a capital and capacity decision rather than a marketing one.
Who signs: dealer principal or owner, general manager, and on multi-store sites the platform president.
16,500 to 17,500
franchised light-vehicle dealerships in the US; rooftop-based counts run closer to 18,000 depending on how a franchise point is defined
Multi-rooftop dealer groups
Where a new franchise is a portfolio decision rather than a single-store bet, taken by people who evaluate brands the way an investor evaluates an asset. The most valuable layer on this page and the hardest to list, because ownership is not published anywhere complete.
Who signs: group chief executive or president, VP of franchise development, buy and sell lead, group CFO.
No public ownership register
the largest 150 groups are published annually; every owner below that line is identified store by store, which is exactly why the layer stays underworked
California and the coastal EV states
Where an electric franchise argues for itself on the showroom floor, because registration share and charging density are already there. Also the most competitive recruiting ground, so the advantage goes to whoever reaches an owner before the next brand does.
Who signs: dealer principal, general manager, and the family or trust that holds the store.
1,200 to 1,500
franchised new-vehicle rooftops in California alone, before the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast corridor are added
Independent used-vehicle retail operators
Large by count, small by qualified count. Most cannot carry a franchise, and the ones that can are the established operators with real estate, service capacity and a service manager already on payroll. That filter is doable from outside, and it is the work almost nobody does.
Who signs: owner, general manager, fixed operations director.
50,000 to 55,000
active independent used-vehicle dealers in the US; the layer with facility and service capacity is a small fraction of it
Commercial and last-mile fleets
The door that does not need a network. A fleet buys on total cost per mile, uptime and service coverage, signs for volume, and is reached directly. Courier and local delivery, utilities and trades, municipal and school fleets, rental and subscription operators all sit here.
Who signs: fleet director, director of procurement, operations VP, and increasingly a sustainability lead who has a target to hit.
Tens of thousands registered
US employers across courier, local delivery and ground transportation; the layer running 20 or more vehicles is a fraction of that and is identified operator by operator

Where the openings are

1
Franchise development is a named-account sale, not a media spend. A few thousand owners decide whether a brand gets shelf space in a market, and no consumer campaign has ever reached one of them in that capacity. It is the same motion as enterprise selling: a finite list, a long cycle, and a conversation that has to be started rather than waited for.
2
The moments that open a door are visible from outside. A store changes hands, a brand exits a market, a franchise point opens, a group announces a new platform. Each one frees capital, facility and staff for a short window. Watching the whole market for those moments is mechanical work; hearing about them through the network means arriving after the decision.
3
Two buyers, two channels, almost no shared language. The dealer principal is buying a business case about throughput, margin per unit and fixed absorption. The fleet director is buying cost per mile and uptime. One list cannot serve both, and one message certainly cannot. Most companies build the first and never build the second.
4
Ownership data is the bottleneck, and it is a research job. Rooftops are countable. The people who own them are not, below the published rankings. That gap is why purchased lists in this market return general managers rather than principals, and it is the part that has to be built rather than bought.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately, alongside published industry counts of US dealerships current to the 2025 reporting year. Rooftops, franchise points and licensed locations are counted differently by different sources, so the bands are deliberately wide. Ownership structure and fleet size are not held in any public register and are described rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
enquirerconsulting.com