Vendor Announcements

A California Dealer Education Instructor introduces a Continuing Dealer Education Course aimed at helping California dealers maintain DMV compliance and protect their licenses. The post outlines key areas covered, including audits, advertising regulations, recordkeeping, BHPH practices, and customer disclosures. The core takeaway is that ongoing education is positioned as essential for both new and experienced dealers navigating California's regulatory environment.

VinAssessment announces a two-part window sticker tool for dealers: a library of 50M+ OEM factory stickers retrievable by VIN, and a custom builder for vehicles where OEM data no longer exists—such as older trade-ins or off-brand units. The key value proposition is giving dealers a professional merchandising asset for any vehicle on the lot, regardless of whether factory documentation survived. The thread is a vendor announcement with limited discussion, but the tool addresses a common gap in used-car merchandising workflows.

VinAssessment introduces itself to the DealerRefresh community as a market intelligence and pricing tool for new and used inventory, claiming to draw on over 200 million vehicle listings, 50 million auction records, and 2 billion vehicle images to provide real-time competitive positioning without manual reporting. The post is an introductory pitch from a first-time poster who is a vendor, sharing the tool's data depth as its core differentiator. The thread appears to be an early-stage vendor introduction with limited community response captured in the excerpt.

Widewail is hosting a live walkthrough of their Q1 2026 Voice of the Customer Report, drawn from 1.2 million Google reviews across 18,000+ U.S. franchise dealerships. The data reveals a paradox: repair quality improved and sales held steady despite affordability pressure, yet service communication negativity hit an all-time high. Thirty of 32 OEM nameplates saw reputation declines, making this a critical watch for dealers trying to understand where customer sentiment is breaking down.

Jon Berna announces LVL Up Auto, a vendor management platform built specifically for car dealerships, covering features like vendor tracking, Collections for organizing vendor lists, 20 Groups for peer collaboration, and a live automotive vendor news feed. The platform has since been rebuilt from the ground up as a headless system with an MCP server, allowing it to run inside AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude rather than requiring a separate login — and the site is now being cited by AI in vendor-related queries, which the community celebrated as a major validation.