GM, Telsa, Mini Cooper, Ford F-Series Top Loyalty Awards

General Motors and Tesla, two companies that embody sharply different visions of the automobile’s future, once again emerged as the industry’s most successful keepers of customers.

On Wednesday, S&P Global Mobility announced the winners of its 30th annual Automotive Loyalty Awards at the Detroit Auto Show, honoring brands that persuaded buyers not only to return to the showroom, but to return to the same badge. For the 11th consecutive year, General Motors captured the award for overall loyalty to a manufacturer, while Tesla earned its fourth straight win for loyalty to a single make.

The results were drawn from an analysis of 13.6 million new-vehicle registrations in the United States from October 2024 through September 2025, a period marked by rising competition, aggressive price moves and rapid changes in consumer tastes.

“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health,” said Joe LaFeir, president of mobility business solutions at S&P Global Mobility. This year’s findings, he said, underscored a central reality of today’s car market: there is no single winning formula. Instead, companies with broad lineups and the ability to hold onto customers across multiple segments are pulling ahead.

That competition has become unusually tight. In several categories, the gap between first and second place was less than a percentage point, according to Vince Palomarez, associate director of loyalty analysis at S&P Global Mobility — a statistical knife-edge that made each win more meaningful.

Some of the biggest gains came from reinvention. Mini was named the most improved brand after redesigns of its Cooper and Countryman models helped bring back former buyers. Chevrolet’s Equinox, also newly updated, won overall loyalty to model, with customer retention rising four percentage points from a year earlier.

Other brands benefited less from new sheet metal than from old-fashioned relationships. Subaru took the top prize for dealer loyalty, buoyed by especially strong performance along the East Coast, where more than 43 percent of customers returned to Subaru dealerships — far above its national average.

Tesla’s dominance reflected a different strategy. The electric-vehicle maker won the award for ethnic market loyalty to make, driven by unusually high retention among Asian and Hispanic households, and also secured its sixth straight victory for highest conquest rate — a measure of how often buyers are pulled away from competing brands.

The full list of winners spans everything from mainstream sedans to heavy-duty pickups. The Mini Cooper topped the mainstream car category, while the Porsche 911 led sports cars. Ford’s F-Series pickups won both light- and heavy-duty truck loyalty, and Lincoln’s Corsair took the luxury utility crown.

Behind the trophies is a simple but telling metric: loyalty is defined as a household returning to buy another new vehicle from the same manufacturer, make or model. In an era when car shoppers are more willing than ever to switch brands — and when new electric entrants continue to crowd the market — keeping a customer has become as valuable as winning a new one.

Three decades into tracking buyer behavior, the message from S&P Global Mobility’s data is clear: in the modern auto industry, loyalty is no longer a given. It is something that must be earned again with every model cycle.