Looking under the tech hood

CADA’s first-ever CARTS study helps dealers better understand Canada’s auto industry tech landscape.

Last fall, at the request of the CADA Industry Relations Committee, the Clarify team set out to learn more about the technology landscape within and across Canada’s new vehicle dealer network. 

With the rapid pace of change, and the strategic importance of technology adoption to retail success in a digital world, the need and timing for this study was clear.

The task seemed straightforward enough, and especially with the sponsorship of RBC Automotive Finance: we’ll talk to as many dealers as we can to learn more about how they deploy digital tools and their investment priorities over the next year.

As we quickly discovered, this is a complicated subject!

For starters, there are over 25 different technology categories available to dealers and the number of potential providers is at least 10 times that number. 

The recent explosion of digital tools and providers is a big factor — the landscape is changing so rapidly. And, in many cases, decision-makers are not necessarily frequent users of these tools. 

While we started down a path focused on technology decision-makers, we quickly realized the picture would not be complete without also hearing from team members who work with these tools everyday. We were very grateful for the 31 dealer leaders who gave us this early feedback and encouraged the expansion of scope.

With the benefit of this feedback, and with recognition that we must not try to “boil the ocean” in the first year, the 2025 Canadian Automotive Retail Technology Study (CARTS) was born with focus on six of the mostly frequently used digital tools (listed in alpha order):

• Appointment Scheduling
• CRM
• Dealer Websites
• Digital Retail
• DMS
• Vehicle Valuation 

CARTS is the first-of-its-kind look at how Canadian dealers leverage technology and what truly drives their satisfaction with these digital tools. The study was conducted this past summer with 549 respondents sharing their perspectives: 261 decision-makers and 288 end-users from across the country, including single- and multiple-point operators, rural, urban and metro stores, and across all brands.

While we don’t have time in this column to go through all CARTS findings, we would like to share a few highlights that have implications for how dealership decision-makers should think about implementing retail technology and how technology providers can optimize their engagement with dealers. Comprehensive 2025 CARTS results are available on the CADA website: https://cada.ca/CADA/Knowledge/TheRoadAhead-alacroiseedeschemins.aspx

• Satisfaction with digital tools depends on several factors but two matter most: A Solution That Meets Your Needs and Ease of Use account for well over half of dealer satisfaction (57 per cent) combined. Dealers must pay particular attention to these factors leading up to the point of sale.
• Dealers should make full use of pilot or trial adoption tests prior to the final decision. Seek feedback from team members regarding ease of use. Critically assess how well the solution integrates within your daily workflow — both data and process integration. Decision-makers should be able to see positive movement in key operational performance indicators. If the business benefit of the software isn’t clear before implementation, it will very likely remain unclear afterward resulting in sub-optimal ROI.

Are Canadian dealers early technology adopters, cautious but open, or wait-and-see laggards? Yes.

When it comes to technology adoption, decision-makers fall into roughly three equally sized categories:

• 30 per cent describe themselves as early adopters, proactively seeking out new digital tools to increase operational efficiency and/or enhance the customer experience.
• 37 per cent are open to change, preferring to be followers, relying on their early adopter peers to blaze the path forward.
• 33 per cent describe themselves as cautious, lagging their peers in the pace of technology adoption but who eventually come on board (the good news is that less than 1 per cent of dealers remain skeptical of the benefits digital tools will bring).
• Over two-thirds of the network (70 per cent) is still deciding whether to lean into the future. This leaves those retailers open to be lapped by competitors who choose to move more quickly. For this group, dealers must be careful not to move too slowly in a fast-moving tech landscape. Balancing the need to learn with the need to act is challenging. The more you focus your conversations on your business needs and impact that technology can deliver, the more confidently you’ll move forward. Use dealer peers and your OEMs as resources to accelerate learning. 

Artificial intelligence (AI)  is here but unevenly adopted

While 60 per cent of decision-makers report the use of at least one AI-driven tool somewhere in their operation, the results are mixed:

• Of the AI adopters, nearly a third of respondents (31 per cent) report AI improved the customer experience. Yet, an almost equal number (30 per cent) report AI has yet to deliver any meaningful benefits.
• This sizable group of respondents who report no noticeable AI impact suggests that dealers and their tech partners need to spend a lot more time together up front, better defining the AI use case (“what problem are we trying to solve?”) and with a proof-of-concept phase before proceeding to full implementation.
• These findings have implications for how tech providers should promote their solutions to dealers: through a lot more asking and a lot less talking. Remember, the key driver of dealer satisfaction is not the length of the feature set, it is the fit between the tech and the dealer’s business needs.
• For the 40 per cent of decision-makers who report no AI deployment in their stores at all: AI is an opportunity to be explored with some alacrity so as not to fall too far behind local competitors who are figuring out how to create advantage.

While CARTS has focused on specific digital tools, dealers must never lose sight of what has made them successful for so long: auto retail in sales and service is a people business. It is about the relationships and trust we establish between our team members and our customers. 

Technology is only a tool. But, to the extent dealers can leverage digital tools to improve operational efficiency and to provide our customers with a more personalized experience, success will be guaranteed well into the future.

A special thank you to all the Canadian dealer decision-makers and end-users from coast to coast who shared your thoughtful feedback in the CART Study. We want even more voices contributing in 2026. Please watch for your CARTS feedback opportunity in the spring.