Best of Automotive retail

The 8 Best Automotive Retail Datasets in 2026

8 Automotive retail picks, ranked on what's inside: field richness, coverage depth, fit for the job. U.S. Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey - Motor Vehicle and Parts Dealers leads — January 1992 to present, monthly.

  • 8ranked picks
  • 43documented fields on stage
  • 3/7with mapped coverage

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Every dataset here carries a 0–10 score built on documented fields, and the ranking follows those scores. When records tie, coverage breaks it: more geography, deeper history, finer granularity. Cadence isn't a scoring axis — it's a delivery setting. Delivered daily, weekly, or hourly, your call.

  1. 1 10/10
    Automotive retail January 1992 to present, monthly

    U.S. Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey - Motor Vehicle and Parts Dealers

    NAICS Code · Kind of Business · Month column (e.g. 'Jul. 2026') …+6 more

    data from U.S. Census Bureau

  2. 2 UK DfT Vehicle Licensing Statistics Collection
  3. 3 9/10
    Automotive retail

    U.S. Census County Business Patterns - Automobile Dealers Establishments

    FIPSTATE · FIPSCTY · NAICS …+7 more

  4. 4 9/10
    Automotive retail 1992 to present, annual

    U.S. Census Annual Retail Trade Survey / AIES - Motor Vehicle Dealers

    NAICS · NAICS_LABEL · GEO_LABEL …+7 more

    Fourth because margin is where dealer-economics questions live, and nothing else computes it annually at 6-digit detail.

    data from U.S. Census Bureau

  5. 5 8/10
    Automotive retail

    SMMT UK Vehicle Data Hub - Registrations and Vehicles in Use

    Fifth because marque-level share is the number the UK market runs on and Motorparc is the parc denominator parts and insurance planners size against.

  6. 6 8/10
    Automotive retail

    NADA Data - Annual Dealership Financial Profile and Market Reports

  7. 7 8/10
    Automotive retail Great Britain · Annual from 1988

    UK ONS Retail Sales Index - Automotive Fuel and Non-Store Time Series

    14 core fields per series record …+11 more

    Deflate nominal trends to real terms for client-ready GB analysis, with the deflator ladder down to predominantly automotive fuel.

  8. 8 6/10
    Automotive retail

    data.gov Federated Catalog - Automotive Retail Datasets

    Eighth because it discovers rather than holds - the map, not the territory - but it remains the map to state-level dealer registers nothing else here indexes.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single best automotive retail dataset?

The U.S. Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey, on our scoring - quality 10/10, the only perfect grade in the slice. It publishes monthly sales, inventories and inventory-to-sales ratios for NAICS 441 split into new car dealers, used car dealers and parts stores from January 1992 onward, with advance estimates roughly five weeks after each reference month.

Where can I get monthly U.S. new car sales data?

Census MRTS. Sales for NAICS 441 and its 4411, 44111, 44112 and 4413 subcategories publish monthly from January 1992, seasonally adjusted and unadjusted, in a bundle of roughly 58,000 observation rows. Advance estimates arrive about five weeks after the reference month and revise in later prints.

Where can I get UK car registration statistics by make?

Two records, two layers. The DfT VEH01-VEH03 collection publishes DVLA-based stock counts from 1994 Q4 and first registrations from January 2001 by make, generic model, body, fuel, CO2 band and keepership down to LSOA, with make/model files around 900,000 rows. SMMT cuts monthly registrations by marque, fuel type and model within days of month close.

Is there dealership financial benchmark data for all 50 states?

Yes - NADA Data's annual profile covers dealership counts, sales, employment, payroll and department-level results for new, used, service and parts and body shop operations nationally and across all 50 states plus D.C., with a 19-page mid-year edition and monthly Market Beat reports. Census ARTS adds the annual gross-margin benchmark back to 1993.

Which datasets track electric vehicle adoption?

For the UK, SMMT's monthly registrations split fuel type including battery-electric and plug-in hybrids, and the DfT VEH tables count plug-in and ultra-low-emission vehicles with quarterly stock snapshots. For specification context, the pooled EPA Fuel Economy Dataset documents MPG, CO2, engine and fuel type for every 1984-2026 model-year vehicle sold in the United States.

How is automotive retail data delivered?

Daily, weekly, or hourly - your call. Demand indices arrive as observation frames keyed by NAICS line and period, footprints as geography-by-industry cells, parc tables as dimensioned rows with make, fuel, band and geography columns. Tell Datadory the markets and dealer lines you need and a scoped sample arrives first, so the schema proves itself before you commit.