How many American car dealerships are there in the us?

Answer 1

Manta, an online business database company, says there are 172,325 records for auto dealers in the U.S.

This number is likely inflated for a number of reasons, including: old data (places that have closed); faulty data (places that are miscategorized); data duplication (places that have multiple entries or business names for single entity); fictitious data; poor data integration.

I'd estimate the actual number of dealerships is closer to 60,000.

The U.S. has less than 20,000 incorporated towns, villages, and cities altogether. Let's round that up to 20k and say 1/10 of those have an average of 15 dealerships (30k), 1/5 have 5 (20k), and the rest have an average of 1 (14k). That gives an estimate of 64,000.