The numbers, and where they come from.

US auto repair industry annual revenue of approximately $92.1B across 307,000+ businesses (2026 report).

Approximately 290-295 million registered motor vehicles in the United States.

The auto service industry needs hundreds of thousands of new technicians over the coming years to keep pace with replacement and growth.

Reporting on multi-day wait times for routine service appointments at US dealerships.

Approximately 18,000 franchised new-car dealerships operate in the United States.

Recovered earnings of ~$21,000 per technician per year is calculated from 30 minutes of saved documentation time x $175/hour average dealership labor rate x 260 working days. Labor rates from publicly reported dealership data.

Direct observations and technician and foreman interviews at premium franchised dealerships (Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz bays). Quotes and time estimates (e.g. clock-in friction, parts coordination delays, terminal trips per car) reflect specific bay observations and are corroborated across sites; per-technician and per-car figures are single-shop estimates and presented as methodology rather than population claims.

Per-shop value range ($113K conservative, $327K aggressive per month, 25-technician reference shop) derived from line-item assumptions: extra billable cars/technician/day x average labor rate, plus parts gross profit, recovered warranty labor, retention savings, recommendation approval lift, and comeback reduction. Inputs and ranges are documented in the internal model and shared on request.

Public benchmark from third-party warranty 3Cs grading tooling reporting OEM warranty claim denial rates dropping from approximately 12% to under 3% when AI-graded narratives are used at submission time. Cited in our internal MVP proposal as the basis for Sona's warranty-quality scoring approach.

NADA 2025 counts 16,990 franchised new-car dealerships in the United States. We address the ~14,000 with 10+ technicians and enough service volume to warrant Sona. At ~$30K ARR per reference shop that is a ~$420M ARR ceiling for the dealership buyer category before any expansion.

CDK Global serves roughly 15,000 dealers and is Brookfield-owned. A June 2024 ransomware incident took dealer systems offline for weeks. A subsequent antitrust settlement (~$630M reported) requires opening third-party access to dealer data, the regulatory tailwind that makes a bi-directional integration layer possible now.

Publicly reported outcomes for companies built on proprietary data captured at a workflow surface: Scale AI (acqui-hired into Meta, ~$14.3B), Physical Intelligence ($400M at $2.4B), Verisk (~$40B public-market cap), Tempus AI (~$8B), Flatiron Health (sold to Roche for $1.9B), Carfax ($5B+ business built on a shallower automotive data substrate), and Bloomberg LP. Used as analogous precedents, not as Sona projections.

Per-shop monthly cost ranges for incumbent point tools at large dealer groups: Xtime (~$3K), myKaarma (~$5 to $6K), TruVideo (~$1 to $2K), Podium (~$500), totaling roughly $10K/shop/mo. Replacing the overlapping workflow tooling with Sona's $2,500/mo bundle yields the per-shop and group-level savings shown. Ranges from publicly reported pricing and pilot-stage conversations.