Who Actually Signs the Agreement With Your Insurer

Short answer: Five ownership forms repair the same car under the same insurer programme. Only the franchise binds the shop owner to an insurer contract that owner is not party to, cannot terminate and is not entitled to a copy of. It is also the only form required to disclose anything.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-09-01 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

How this page was produced: Researched, drafted and checked with AI assistance under human direction, and signed off by the named author. How this site is written

Your body shop is owned in one of five ways: by a private equity fund, by a listed company, by a franchisee under a national brand, by the dealership down the road, or by the person who greets you. The repair is the same and so is the insurer programme. What differs is where the loss lands when the carrier walks or the business fails, and almost none of it is visible at the counter.

One of the five leaves a paper trail. Under the FTC Franchise Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 436, a franchisor in a registration state must file its Franchise Disclosure Document with a state regulator: its own words, signed under penalty of the state franchise statute and served free by the state. It is not audited and not adjudicated, and every cover page says so: "no governmental agency has verified the information contained in this document." This article is built from four such filings, eight Forms 10-K, one Form 40-F and two state registries, each re-pulled from the primary source and string-matched before publication.

What the franchisee actually signs

Four collision and paint franchise brands in the United States sit under one ultimate parent, Driven Brands Holdings Inc.: CARSTAR, ABRA, Fix Auto USA and Maaco. Each is franchised by its own single-brand Delaware entity, and each of those entities states the same chain in Item 1: it is a direct, wholly-owned subsidiary of Driven Systems LLC, and an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Driven Brands, Inc., which is owned through Driven Holdings, LLC by Driven Brands Holdings. None of the four owns a collision outlet: the company-owned row of all four Item 20 tables reads zero at every year end from 2022 to 2024. The capital, the lease, the payroll, the technicians and the failure risk sit with an independent owner. The brand, the insurer contract and the fee schedule sit with the franchisor.

[REPORTED, franchisor's own regulatory filing] CARSTAR's December 2025 filing sets out the architecture in Item 1:

"CARSTAR has entered into agreements with certain insurance companies ('Corporately Managed Insurance Programs' or 'CMIPs') under the terms of which CMIP partners may provide preferred access to participation in their direct repair programs ('DRPs') or performance-based agreements ('PBAs'). In order to participate in these CMIPs, you will enter into our then-current form of Service Level Agreement."

That Service Level Agreement is filed as an exhibit to the franchise agreement, which is the only reason it is public. Its recitals name the parties to the insurer contract, and the shop is not among them: the franchisor, its indirect parent Driven Brands Inc. or an affiliate of either "has entered into the master service and other similar franchisor-managed or performance-based agreements ... listed on Exhibit B hereto ... with various insurance carrier customers."

The carriers are the franchisor's customers. Clause 2.2 makes the consequence automatic: "This Agreement shall terminate automatically with no further action by the Parties if all of the Master Service Agreements expire or are terminated for any reason."

The clause

Clause 5.1 is the load-bearing document here. It is reproduced complete, because a contract clause quoted without its qualifiers is not a quote:

"In performing services for customers or policyholders of the Carriers and/or the Carriers themselves, Franchisee agrees to participate in all of the Programs and provide the services described in the Master Service Agreements as if Franchisee were the 'provider,' 'supplier,' 'vendor,' or such similar designated party thereunder. Franchisee hereby makes all of the representations and warranties, agrees to all of the affirmative and negative covenants, and generally agrees to comply with and be bound by all of the terms and conditions and obligations set forth in the Master Service Agreements (including, for the avoidance of doubt, all schedules, exhibits, and other attachments thereto) that apply to such service providers thereunder (collectively, the 'Carrier Requirements'). The Carrier Requirements include, but are not limited to, terms and conditions in the Master Service Agreements related to fees and expenses, discounts, estimates, rental cars, shop management, valet programs, confidentiality, subcontracting, indemnification, insurance coverage, privacy and data security, inspections, quality control, business continuity and disaster recovery, background checks, anti-fraud training, intellectual property, gifts and gratuities, inducements, environmental responsibility, governance, codes of conduct, and any service-level objectives and key performance indicators. Franchisor shall provide a summary of the Carrier Requirements to Franchisee as necessary to facilitate Franchisee's compliance therewith, but due to confidentiality and other obligations Franchisor shall not be obligated to provide a copy of a Master Service Agreement to Franchisee."

Read the middle of that list. "Fees and expenses, discounts, estimates" and "indemnification" are among the terms the shop is bound by. The closing sentence carries the franchisor's undertaking to summarise, which belongs in any fair reading, and the limit on that undertaking in the same breath.

Two clauses elsewhere in the same agreement carry that undertaking further, and they belong here for the same reason. Clause 3.0 lets the franchisor rewrite the list of insurer contracts "in Franchisor's sole discretion by providing written notice to Franchisee", and then conditions it: "provided, that Franchisor timely provides any copies of applicable Carrier Requirements." Clause 5.2 does the same for the franchisor's own requirements, its notice "shall include copies of any agreed-upon terms and conditions with vendors that Franchisee is required to use." Both provisos appear in all three filings that contain clause 5.1. So the position on the face of the contract is narrower than "the shop sees nothing": the shop is entitled to a summary of the Carrier Requirements, and to copies of the applicable Carrier Requirements when the list changes. What it is not entitled to is a copy of the Master Service Agreement itself, and clause 5.1 says so in terms.

Earlier research had this clause from CARSTAR alone and warned against attributing it elsewhere. That caution can be lifted, with one qualification. The clause appears in the ABRA and Fix Auto filings too, each filed separately with the state, each closing with the same sentence. Fix Auto's is word for word identical to the text above. ABRA's differs by a single stray word, reading "be bound by the all of the terms and conditions", and is otherwise identical including the closing sentence.

The exhibit that would name the insurers is empty. In the CARSTAR filing the page headed "EXHIBIT B MASTER SERVICE AGREEMENTS" carries 69 characters, all of it heading and document stamp. In ABRA's it carries 68. Fix Auto's is the same bare heading. The next page of each document, Exhibit C, carries over 1,200 characters, so the instrument reading these pages works. Three filings, three blank exhibits, and the public still does not learn which carriers hold the contracts.

The penalty other people trigger

Clause 6.0, complete:

"Franchisee hereby expressly agrees to comply with any penalty assessments contained in the Master Service Agreements. Franchisee acknowledges and agrees that, if any Repair Shop fails, and/or applicable participating repair shops collectively fail, to meet certain key performance indicators applicable to one (1) or more Master Service Agreements during the measurement period(s) set forth in such Master Service Agreement(s), Franchisee may be assessed a penalty or be required to provide a bottom-line discount on the chargeable price of repair assignments, the amount of which may be higher depending on the performance of the Repair Shop(s) and other factors as determined by Franchisor. Any discount or penalty assessed pursuant to this paragraph shall be paid or provided to the customer and/or Carrier and is not retained by Franchisor."

One shop's prices can be discounted because other shops it does not control, and may never have met, collectively missed a carrier's key performance indicators. The measurement is the carrier's; the discount lands on the individual owner.

The final sentence is exculpatory and travels with the clause every time it is quoted: the money goes to the customer or the carrier and is not retained by the franchisor. On the face of the contract the franchisor does not profit from the penalty. That sentence appears verbatim in all three filings containing the clause.

The fee for a contract you did not negotiate

Section J of the CARSTAR franchise agreement, in body text rather than a fee table:

"Franchisee agrees to pay Franchisor a central review fee (the 'Central Review Fee') equal to one-half percent (0.5%) of monthly Gross Sales generated through Corporately Managed Insurance Programs ... provided that Franchisor may increase the amount of the Central Review Fee, up to two percent (2%) of such Gross Sales, upon thirty (30) days' prior written notice to Franchisee."

The rate differs by brand and a single group figure would be wrong. CARSTAR's Item 6 table records "Currently, 0.5% of all Gross Sales generated by CMIPs"; ABRA's records "(Currently, 0% of applicable Gross Sales; we may increase this fee and charge up to 2% of Gross Sales generated by CMIPs)". Same cap, same notice, one brand charging and one not.

What the fee buys is a "continuous periodic review of Franchisee's participation in the Programs and the estimates provided by Franchisee thereunder", in the franchisor's sole discretion against metrics it sets. A third party reviews the repairer's estimates, the repairer pays for the review, and the reviewer sets the standard. Exhibit C to the same agreement, headed "FRANCHISOR REQUIREMENTS", is the list of minimum requirements the franchisee must comply with under clause 5.2. Item 3 on it is "Central Review participation for applicable partnerships", which is scoped rather than universal, and item 5 is "I-CAR Gold Class certification", which is not.

What the franchisee gets, because that is the other half

The bargain is real and the same filings quantify it. CARSTAR's Item 19 discloses that across the 397 facilities it included for fiscal 2024, the average facility held 6.5 direct repair programmes and 2.6 performance-based agreements, medians 6.0 and 3.0. That is carrier access at a scale no document read here shows a single-location independent obtaining on its own, and no document read here measures what such a shop holds either. These are Item 19 figures, which are the franchisor's own representations and never audited fact. The filing says so: "This financial performance representation was prepared without an audit. Prospective franchisees or sellers of franchises should be advised that no certified public accountant has audited these figures or expressed his/her opinion with regard to their contents or form."

Other findings cut in the franchisor's favour. The penalty money is not retained by it. The franchisee keeps the equity, because the franchisor owns no shops: CARSTAR's Item 20 records 50 outlets transferred to new owners over three years, and the only company-owned movement in the whole four-brand dataset runs the other way, ten CARSTAR shops in Washington State sold to franchisees in fiscal 2022. And the shop sets its own prices: ABRA's franchise agreement provides that "Franchisee will have the right to advertise and sell its products and services at whatever prices Franchisee determines."

CARSTAR discloses a franchisee advisory board and names its eleven franchisee members by region, though the limit is in the filing's own word: "Participants are invited to serve in an advisory capacity." ABRA's Item 20 records the absence of an independent alternative: "There are no trademark-specific franchisee organizations associated with the Abra system." All four filings carry the Franchise Rule's disclosure that franchisees sign "provisions restricting their ability to speak openly about their experience", CARSTAR's in the past tense and naming a three-year window, ABRA's, Maaco's and Fix Auto's in the present.

The survival record, including the half that argues the other way

Item 20 is a mandatory outlet table, and its columns are the hardest numbers available on whether franchised collision shops survive. All four brands are on the record, read digit by digit off the filed tables.

The totals row is our arithmetic, summed from four filed totals rows, and it reconciles: 1,074 plus 226 openings less 199 exits gives 1,101, the sum of the four filed end-2024 counts.

Take ABRA and Maaco alone and the story writes itself: 20 openings against 75 terminations and one non-renewal in three years. Take the whole estate and that story is false. CARSTAR opened 148 shops and grew from 419 to 471; Fix Auto opened 58 and grew from 181 to 212. The estate went from 1,074 to 1,101.

We are not saying franchised collision shops are dying. Sixty-two per cent of this estate sits in two brands, CARSTAR and Fix Auto, that grew over the same three years under the same parent, at the same Charlotte address, on the same service level agreement.

That comparison is the control this subject needs, and it sits inside the franchise form itself. One parent, one Charlotte address, four brands, four outcomes: plus 52 outlets, plus 31, minus 48, minus 8. If ownership form determined survival, the four tables would look alike.

Three things do hold across all four. Exits are large and constant: 192 terminations plus seven non-renewals against a base of 1,074, and in fiscal 2024 alone 61 exits against 1,090 outlets at the start of the year, 5.6 per cent of the estate in one year (our arithmetic, summed from the four filed totals rows for that year: 2 at ABRA, 19 at Maaco, 32 at CARSTAR and 8 at Fix Auto). Every exit, in all four brands and all three years, is coded a termination or a non-renewal: "reacquired by franchisor" is zero, 199 times out of 199, and so is "ceased operations, other reasons". And the pipelines diverge: agreements signed but outlet not opened at 28 December 2024 stood at 125 for Maaco, 83 for CARSTAR, 4 for Fix Auto and zero for ABRA, whose Item 1 explains its own zero by stating it is "offering new franchises only to existing Abra franchise owners that are in good standing."

What Item 20 calls a termination, Item 19 calls closed, in the same document

CARSTAR's Item 20 records 31 terminations plus one non-renewal for fiscal 2024, which is 32 exits. CARSTAR's Item 19, in the same document, excludes from its earnings table "the 32 CARSTAR Facilities that closed during the 2024 Fiscal Year". Maaco's Item 20 records 19 terminations and no non-renewals. Maaco's Item 19 excludes "19 Maaco Centers that closed during the 2024 Fiscal Year, none of which operated for less than 12 months."

Each franchisor, in one document, calls the same shops terminations in Item 20 and closed in Item 19, with counts matching exactly in both brands. We do not claim any franchisor disciplined anybody. Nothing in the four filings says who ended any relationship. The defensible form of words is "recorded as terminations in the franchisor's Item 20."

Those exclusions also show what an Item 19 table is: CARSTAR's removes 48 facilities that opened during the year, 26 that did not report every month, and the 32 that closed. It is a survivors' table. Even among survivors the spread is wide. The bottom half of the 397 averaged $1,629,645 in Gross Sales and the top half $4,415,194, medians $1,700,434 and $3,855,912, against an average for all 397 of $3,205,928 and a median of $2,579,601. The filing's own count of facilities at or above that average is 148 of 397, which it puts at 37 per cent.

The dealer down the road, and a measured silence

Five of the six public auto retailers disclose a collision centre count in their fiscal 2025 Form 10-K: AutoNation 52, Penske 36, Asbury 39, Group 1 32 and Sonic 16, a total of 175. Two of those numbers are not purely American. Group 1 breaks its 32 down as "21 collision centers in the U.S. and 109 dealerships and 11 collision centers in the U.K.", so the US figure it discloses is 21, and Penske's 36 is not stated to be domestic at all in a filing that also describes UK operations. Lithia gives no count, only "collision repair and paint shops" in its property description. The strings "direct repair", "DRP" and "I-CAR" appear zero times in each of the six fiscal 2025 Form 10-K primary documents.

That is an absence claim, so here is the instrument. The same script over the same six whitespace-flattened documents in the same pass counted "collision" 29, 23, 29, 17, 29 and 1 times for AutoNation, Penske, Asbury, Group 1, Sonic and Lithia, counted "insurance" 138 times at AutoNation and between 50 and 112 times elsewhere, and returned zero for two nonsense probes in all six. The hyphenated and unspaced variants "direct-repair", "ICAR" and "DRPs" return zero as well. AutoNation writes the word insurance 138 times to its shareholders and the phrase direct repair not once.

The two largest first-party statements about dealer collision economics contradict each other in the same filing season. Asbury: "We believe our collision repair centers provide us with an attractive opportunity to grow our business due to the high margins provided by collision repair services and the fact that we are able to source original equipment manufacturer parts from our franchised dealerships." Group 1: "We are strategically reducing our collision footprint and repurposing a portion of that space to traditional service capacity, which we expect to increase returns from the higher margin service business."

Both are public companies describing their own operations in documents they are legally responsible for, and they cannot both be a general truth about dealer collision economics. But they are not equally fresh, and that cuts against the one this article would otherwise lean on. A full-text search of every Form 10-K on EDGAR returns Asbury's high-margin sentence in eleven filings, one a year for fiscal 2015 through fiscal 2025. It is not word-for-word constant across those eleven, and the drift is trivial: fiscal 2015 to 2017 read "We believe that our collision repair centers", fiscal 2018 to 2021 dropped that "that" and also read "the fact we are able to source", and fiscal 2022 to 2025 carry the sentence exactly as quoted above. The claim does not turn on that word and is identical in all eleven: the same argument for the same business reason, filed once a year for eleven years. It is a decade of carried-forward language, not a statement about the current year. The negative control is Asbury's own earlier filings: the phrase "high margins provided by collision repair services" appears nowhere in its Forms 10-K for fiscal 2012, 2013 or 2014, which the same script read in the same pass and in which the word "collision" appears 15, 14 and 12 times. Group 1's sentence returns exactly once, in the fiscal 2025 filing where it first appears. Asbury's own numbers also complicate its sentence: collision gross profit fell from $128.6 million to $126.4 million, the only one of its four parts-and-service profit streams to shrink.

Then there is the transaction showing what a dealer can keep without owning the shop. In October 2021 Caliber announced it "will acquire up to 17 collision repair centers from AutoNation during the fourth quarter 2021. The transaction includes a long-term agreement for AutoNation to refer collision customers to those centers and for Caliber to continue to purchase parts from AutoNation." AutoNation's own filings record 74 collision centres at the end of 2020 and 57 at the end of 2021. The dealer gave up the repair, kept the referral and kept the parts order.

We are not claiming those 17 shops account for the whole fall of 17. The counts are consistent and the announcement is dated inside that year, but AutoNation's 10-K does not reconcile them and the announcement says "up to 17".

Where the disclosure actually is

The corporate form discloses what a securities regulator makes it disclose. Boyd Group Services, which is listed, tells investors that "A high percentage of the Company's revenues are derived from insurance companies", that its ability to grow "is largely reliant on its ability to maintain these DRP relationships", and that its top five insurers "in aggregate account for approximately 54% (2024 - 51%) of total sales", with one at "approximately 19%" and a second at "approximately 12%". It names none of them. On who can walk away it is blunt: "DRP relationships are governed by agreements that are usually cancellable upon short notice."

Set the regimes side by side and the finding is not the one the industry expects. A franchised shop, typically one location, is the most transparent collision business in America: its fee schedule, total investment, supplier rebates, litigation, three-year survival table and the text of its insurer-facing agreement are all filed with a state and served free of charge. A listed corporate discloses carrier concentration to the percentage point but publishes no contract. Five of the six public dealer groups disclose a collision centre count, the sixth does not disclose even that, and between them they publish no insurer term of any kind. A private-equity-owned chain and an independent single shop disclose nothing at all.

Disclosure tracks ownership form, not size. That is what this exercise produces, and it matters for one reason: nearly everything outsiders can check about how insurers and repairers deal with each other comes from the one form legally required to file, and that form covers 1,101 shops out of the 35,422 establishments the federal series counts in this industry.

What we could not establish, and the walls

No Master Service Agreement is public, for any ownership form. Exhibit B is a bare title page in three separate filings. The only contract text here touching carrier terms is the Service Level Agreement, public because franchising requires it to be filed.

What an independent shop's insurer agreement says. No instance was located in any source read for this article. That form files nothing with any regulator, so there is no register to look in.

Who ended any franchise relationship. Item 19 calling the same shops "closed" bounds the Item 20 coding but does not say who initiated an exit.

Any independent franchisee voice. No on-the-record statement by a named CARSTAR, ABRA or Fix Auto franchisee was found, in either direction. The only interview located is published by the franchisor itself.

Why six Driven Brands registrations lapsed in Minnesota in July 2026. The Minnesota registry records Orders of Cancellation in a fourteen-day window against ABRA and FUSA on 14 July and against CARSTAR, Maaco, Take 5 and Meineke on 27 July. The two we pulled in full, CARSTAR's and Maaco's, give an administrative ground, "failed to file an annual report and fee pursuant to Minn. Stat. 80C.08, subd. 1", and no finding of misconduct. Both controls cut against reading anything larger into it. The lapse is not collision-specific: Take 5 is the group's quick-lube brand and Meineke its mechanical one, and both were cancelled the same day as CARSTAR and Maaco. And it is not group-wide: CARSTAR's own Item 1 names nine Driven Holdings franchisors, and one of the nine, 1-800-Radiator Franchisor SPV LLC, holds an active Wisconsin registration while the other eight are absent from that list. We are not saying the group has abandoned its registrations. Wisconsin's list carries no history, 1-800-Radiator was never among the six Minnesota registrations in the first place, no company statement was located, and nine further registration states were not checked.

Maaco's insurer architecture. Its filing references "corporately managed insurance programs" twice and "service level agreement" six times, in lower case, but contains no "CMIP" acronym, no "Master Service Agreement", no Central Review Fee and no "insurance carrier customers". It is neither an instance of clause 5.1 nor a counter-example to it. That distinction only appeared on a case-insensitive re-run; the case-sensitive pass would have published a false absence.

Walls. Business Wire returned HTTP 403 to one route and HTTP 200 to two others, a bot rule rather than a missing page. Minnesota's registry serves no robots.txt and returned 403 to one user agent and 200 to a browser agent on the identical URL. Caliber's own newsroom page for the AutoNation release renders as a JavaScript shell with no article text. The establishment count above was re-taken from a host whose robots file permits it, replacing an inherited figure drawn from one that does not. No wall stopped any document used here.

A success code that was not the page. Business Wire release 20211026005426 returns HTTP 200 by two independent routes and serves an unrelated press release, "ComputerCare Certified by The Women's Business Enterprise National Council". The Caliber announcement is release 20211026005321. An HTTP 200 identified the wrong document twice before the body was read, which is why the identifier and not the status code is recorded below.

Corrections

To the research this article inherited. Two earlier passes recorded the Fix Auto Franchise Disclosure Document as unobtainable after four failed retrieval attempts. It is not a wall: the same document at the same Minnesota URL downloaded and parsed on the first attempt here, 339 pages. Its Item 20 is published above and its Service Level Agreement carries the same clause 5.1. A wall recorded once and never retested cost the earlier work a whole brand.

To the provenance of the Maaco figures. Earlier work warned that the Maaco filing came from an object-storage mirror rather than the state registry. Both copies were downloaded here and are byte-identical, same size and same SHA-1. The warning is discharged.

To the AutoNation transaction. The sentences about the referral agreement and the parts purchasing are Caliber's words in Caliber's announcement, not AutoNation's, whose filings supply only the centre counts.

To the scope of clause 5.1. Earlier work warned against attributing the clause beyond CARSTAR. It extends to ABRA and Fix Auto and stops there. Maaco, a paint and auto body brand rather than a mechanical one, files no version of it.

To the Boyd citation. These disclosures are verified from Exhibit 99.1 to Boyd's Form 40-F for fiscal 2025, not from an annual report.

To the corporate chain. An earlier draft called Driven Brands Inc. the franchisor's parent. Item 1 of all four filings says the franchisor is a direct, wholly-owned subsidiary of Driven Systems LLC and an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Driven Brands, Inc. Driven Systems, not Driven Brands, is also the entity that guarantees each franchisor's performance under Item 21.

To the fiscal 2024 exit count. An earlier draft gave 58 exits and 5.3 per cent. Re-summed from the four filed totals rows the figures are 61 and 5.6 per cent.

To the identity of clause 5.1 across brands. Fix Auto's text is word for word identical to CARSTAR's. ABRA's carries one extra word.

2026-09-01, cross-article audit. To the Asbury sentence. An earlier draft said the sentence appears in eleven Forms 10-K for fiscal 2015 through fiscal 2025 "unchanged". The count and the span are right and are re-confirmed here from the filings themselves, but the wording is not constant: three variants run across the eleven years, differing only in the word "that". A companion page in this series, who owns the body shop you are standing in, had corrected the same sentence the other way, to eight filings from fiscal 2018, on an exact-sentence match that the fiscal 2015 to 2017 filings fail on that one word. Eleven is the right answer and the variants are now printed here so that neither page can be read as contradicting the other.

Rejected

• The Item 6 fee tables as verbatim quotations from a text extraction. Every fee table read here interleaves its columns when extracted as text, so a quotation running across cells is a reconstruction, and three probes failed on exactly this. The figures above come from table-object extraction and single-column body text; fee-table wording is quoted only where the table object supplied the cell.
• "Franchised collision shops are dying." Contradicted by 62 per cent of the estate it describes.
• "Driven Brands stopped maintaining its franchise registrations across all its brands." Contradicted by its own positive control, 1-800-Radiator's active Wisconsin registration.
• A claim that Maaco's filing never mentions insurer programmes. A case-sensitive probe returned zero; a case-insensitive probe over the same document returned eight hits. The absence was the instrument.
• Any characterisation of what franchisees think of these brands. Not established.

Related

• How much of a body shop's work comes from one insurer
• What a body shop owner is actually selling
• Three states ban steering, and no two ban the same thing

Sources

All four Franchise Disclosure Documents are the December 2025 amendments filed with the Minnesota Department of Commerce, retrieved as PDFs and parsed to text and table objects, read on 2026-09-01.

• CARSTAR Franchisor SPV LLC, document 35178-202512-02, file 10909. 406 pages.
• ABRA Franchisor SPV LLC, document 35181-202512-04, file 11074. 269 pages.
• FUSA Franchisor SPV LLC (Fix Auto USA), document 35179-202512-02, file 10914. 339 pages.
• Maaco Franchisor SPV LLC, document 35144-202512-04, file 10915. 329 pages.
• Minnesota Department of Commerce, Orders of Cancellation 10909-202607-01 (CARSTAR) and 10915-202607-01 (Maaco), both dated 07/27/2026, retrieved and read in full. The other four cancellations, ABRA file 11074 and FUSA file 10914 dated 07/14/2026 and Take 5 file 10913 and Meineke file 10930 dated 07/27/2026, are taken from the CARDS registry index, search franchisor="Franchisor SPV", year=2026. Read on 2026-09-01.
• Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, Franchise Filing: Active Registrations, 1,847 dated entries. Read on 2026-09-01.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, NAICS 811121, 2024, private ownership, area US000, aggregation level 18: 35,422 establishments and 257,163 employees. From www.bls.gov, whose robots file permits /cew/. Read on 2026-09-01.
• AutoNation Forms 10-K for fiscal 2025, 2021 and 2020, and Penske, Asbury, Group 1, Sonic and Lithia for fiscal 2025, all on EDGAR. Read on 2026-09-01.
• EDGAR full-text search, efts.sec.gov, Form 10-K, for the Asbury and Group 1 sentences quoted above: eleven hits for Asbury on the phrase "high margins provided by collision repair services", spanning fiscal 2015 to fiscal 2025 with no gap, one hit for Group 1, and zero on a nonsense control string in the same batch. Each of the eleven filings, and Asbury's fiscal 2012, 2013 and 2014 filings, was then downloaded from the EDGAR Archives and string-matched directly. Read on 2026-09-01.
• Boyd Group Services Inc., Form 40-F for fiscal 2025, accession 0001193125-26-112466, Exhibit 99.1 Annual Information Form. Read on 2026-09-01.
• Caliber, "Caliber to Acquire 17 Collision Repair Centers from AutoNation", Business Wire release 20211026005321, 26 October 2021. Read on 2026-09-01. The release identifier matters: see the walls note above.

Method note. Every quotation was matched against a full-text or table-object extraction of the primary document, whitespace flattened and quotation marks normalised, and every absence claim carried a positive and a nonsense-string negative control. Three long quotations, clause 5.1 among them, failed on the first pass because page numbers and running heads sit inside them where the text crosses a page break; they matched once that furniture was stripped, controls unchanged. Trademark symbols are omitted from quotations, and where a figure is our arithmetic the text says so.

General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.

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