The new Turn Time tool tracks median days-on-lot for 230 models, drawn from 158,816 real dealership sales. The typical vehicle takes 38 days to sell, but the range runs from 25 days to well over 100.
AutoRaptor, which has built CRM and sales software for independent dealerships for 15 years, today published Turn Time, a free, public look at how long vehicles actually sit in inventory before they sell. The data is live and comes from real, de-identified sales activity across AutoRaptor’s dealership customers, not survey estimates or manufacturer averages.
The data covers 230 vehicle models and 158,816 retail sales, and for each model it reports the median days on lot: the point between intake and sale where half of units sell faster and half sell slower. Across the full sample, that median is 38 days. The spread between individual models, though, is wide, and that’s where the data gets useful.
“Every dealer knows some cars move and some cars sit, but very few people outside a franchise manufacturer have the sales volume to prove it model by model,” said Jami Ribeiro, Head of Customer Success at AutoRaptor. “We already have tens of thousands of real transactions running through our platform every month. Publishing that as a free benchmark was an easy call – it gives independent dealers the same kind of data edge the franchise side has had for years.”
Why Turn Time matters
Days on lot is one of the clearest signs of how a dealership is doing. Every extra day a vehicle sits adds floorplan interest, reconditioning cost, and pressure to cut the price just to move it. Independent dealers, who sell mostly used inventory and don’t have manufacturer data to fall back on, have never had a public number to check a model against before buying it at auction or taking it in on trade. That’s the gap Turn Time is meant to fill.
Methodology
Turn Time reports the median rather than the average. A small number of vehicles that sit for a year or longer would otherwise pull the number up and make it less useful; the median reflects what a typical vehicle on a typical lot actually experiences. Days on lot are counted as the calendar days between a vehicle entering inventory and its recorded sale date, including any reconditioning time. Vehicles with no entry date on file, sales recorded before the entry date, and anything over 730 days on the lot are excluded — those are data-entry errors, not genuinely slow-moving cars.
“The figures come from aggregated, de-identified sales activity across the independent dealerships that use AutoRaptor. We publish totals across many dealerships, never results tied to one dealership, and we only publish a model once it has at least 150 sales in the data (40 for a specific model year), so the numbers hold up statistically. No customer records, buyer information, or dealership names are included. We don’t publish gross profit figures, because our price data is incomplete and any margin number we reported would be unreliable.”
Turn Time updates monthly and currently reflects sales from January 2024 through September 2026.
Fifteen years in, still independent-only
The launch lines up with AutoRaptor’s 15th year serving independent dealerships across North America. The company plans to bring Turn Time to the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association (NIADA) and other industry audiences, where inventory turn and floorplan cost are among the topics members ask about most, and will keep adding models and markets to the data set over time.
The full model-by-model breakdown, including individual pages such as the one for the Acura TLX, is available now at autoraptor.com/turn-time.
About AutoRaptor
AutoRaptor is a web-based CRM platform that helps independent dealerships manage sales, workflows, customer data, and inventory marketing, giving teams the tools they need to convert more leads, retain more customers, and sell more effectively. For 15 years, AutoRaptor has focused exclusively on the independent dealership market, serving as a single, easy-to-use platform for sales, communication, and inventory management. To learn more or book a demo, visit autoraptor.com.