Key Takeaways
- Six giants dominate auto services. Private equity firms control most major chains, maintaining local branding for customer trust.
- Mavis expands with Pep Boys acquisition. This move highlights the consolidation trend in the industry.
- Private equity’s strategic play. Firms like Roark and Monomoy capitalize on regional brand equity without rebranding.
- Impact on consumers. Consolidation offers benefits like pricing and availability but reduces competition and choice.
Bottom line: A few powerful companies, driven by private equity, quietly control most auto service chains, impacting consumer choice and market dynamics.
AI assisted, editor reviewed
Mavis Tire just bought Pep Boys from Carl Icahn’s holding company for $700 million—making one of the nation’s biggest tire retailers even bigger. But the more interesting thing isn’t that Mavis expanded. It’s who Mavis really is, and what it tells you about the shop on your corner.
Earlier this month, we clocked that O’Reilly Auto Parts was looking to buy NAPA’s auto parts stores, which brought us down a rabbit hole of the American aftermarket auto parts businesses. (TL;DR: There are only four major auto parts retailers left in America, and two could merge.)
This week, the “Mavis to Acquire Pep Boys” release hit my desk. Mavis has several thousand locations across the country and Pep Boys has about 800—so this is mildly interesting industry news in its own right. But it made me wonder—regardless of how many auto service chains we have in America, how many holding companies are actually in control of them? The answer is six—there are six monolithic companies running almost every chain car repair place in the country.
And I bet you can guess where the real power behind those parent companies comes from: yep, private equity. Mavis (BayPine/Goldman/TSG), Driven (Roark), Jiffy Lube (now Monomoy), Take 5 (Roark), Strickland Brothers (Roark since 2024)—the automotive service industry, just like the aftermarket, is being rolled up by PE firms that keep the familiar regional signage precisely because the local brand equity is the asset.
The Trick Is Keeping the Sign the Same
The playbook is straightforward. A private equity firm buys a regional chain—say, a beloved tire shop that’s been in your area for 40 years—and then it does not repaint the building. The local name stays up. The brand equity that shop spent decades building is precisely the asset the buyer paid for, so painting over it would be lighting money on fire.
The result is that you can drive across the country and visit what look like a dozen different locally famous tire-and-service shops, and half of them answer to the same parent company. The fragmentation you see on the street is a feature, not an accident. It’s what lets these companies get to enormous scale without looking like the Walmart of oil changes or starting fresh with brand-building.
Now, of course, there are still thousands of single-location, operator-owned indie auto shops. And there are also franchises in the mix—quite a few of the brands on this list below do have local owners for some locations, even if the name on the door belongs to a bigger company. But when it comes to the local brand-name type enterprises, here’s how the six empires of auto service shake out.
Mavis Tire Express Services
Who owns it: Private equity—a group including BayPine, Goldman Sachs’ West Street, and TSG Consumer Partners.
This is the one buying Pep Boys, and it’s the poster child for the strategy. You may know Mavis by its own name if you’re in the Northeast, but if not, you almost certainly know one of its other faces: NTB, Tire Kingdom, Tuffy, Town Fair Tire, Express Oil Change & Tire Engineers, and Brakes Plus, plus a scattering of even regional banners like Action Gator, Jack Williams, and Dekalb Tire. Last year, Mavis absorbed Midas, a huge brand on its own. Mavis runs its flagship under two names—Mavis Discount Tire and Mavis Tires & Brakes—largely to sidestep a trademark tangle over the word “Discount.” Add Pep Boys and its roughly 800 locations, and Mavis becomes one of the largest service networks on the continent.
Driven Brands
Who owns it: Publicly traded, but controlled by Roark Capital, the private equity firm behind a huge chunk of American franchising.
If Mavis is the tire-and-service empire, Driven is its mirror image across oil changes, repair, and collision work. The portfolio, per the company’s filings, includes Take 5 Oil Change, Meineke, Maaco, CARSTAR, ABRA, Auto Glass Now, and 1-800-Radiator & A/C. That’s the quick-lube place, the muffler place, the paint-and-body place, and the windshield place—all under one Charlotte roof. It’s arguably the closest analog to what Mavis is building.
Monro
Who owns it: Publicly traded, headquartered in Rochester, New York.
Monro describes its holdings as a family of 16 regional brands, and that word—regional—is the whole game. You’ve got Monro Auto Service, Mr. Tire, Tire Choice, and a long tail of local names like Free Service Tire and McGee. Each one reads as a hometown operation. Each one rolls up to the same corporate parent in upstate New York. Monro’s footprint is heaviest across the East, so if you’re anywhere in the Northeast, you’ve probably handed your keys to Monro without knowing it.
Bridgestone Retail Operations
Who owns it: Bridgestone—the tire manufacturer itself.
This is the vertically integrated model, and it’s a different animal from the PE rollups. The company that makes the tires also owns the bays that install them. Bridgestone Retail Operations runs Firestone Complete Auto Care, Tires Plus, Hibdon Tires Plus, and Wheel Works, and calls itself the world’s largest company-owned auto-care chain. When you get Bridgestone or Firestone tires put on at a Firestone shop, the same corporation is on both ends of the transaction.
Fun fact: Bridgestone actually tried to buy Pep Boys in 2015, but lost the bidding war to Icahn (who’s now selling to Mavis). It’s all just big-money musical chairs.
Valvoline
Who owns it: Publicly traded (NYSE: VVV).
Here’s a fun wrinkle that says a lot about how this industry has splintered. Valvoline the oil-change chain and Valvoline the oil are no longer the same company. The retail service business—Valvoline Instant Oil Change, Great Canadian Oil Change, and the Express Care platform—is a pure-play service company now. The oil-manufacturing side was sold off to Saudi Aramco in 2023. So the brand on the sign and the jug of oil going into your engine can trace back to two entirely different owners.
Jiffy Lube
Who owns it: As of earlier this year, private equity—Monomoy Capital Partners.
And this is the freshest piece of the puzzle. Jiffy Lube—maybe the single most recognizable oil-change name in the country—just changed hands. In March 2026, Shell agreed to sell the roughly 2,000-location franchise network to Monomoy Capital Partners in a deal reported at about $1.3 billion. In July, the deal went through. Shell had owned it for two decades; now it’s moving to a PE consolidator. Which means the same year Pep Boys left Icahn for Mavis, Jiffy Lube left Shell for Monomoy. Two of the most familiar names in American car care, both trading a strategic corporate parent for a financial one, within months of each other.
What This Actually Means for You
None of this is inherently sinister. Jiffy Lube customers are there because they want to get in and out quickly, not because they want to have a special relationship with their mechanic or want complex work done on unique cars anyway. On the upside for most daily driver customers, scale can mean better pricing, more consistent warranties, and parts availability a true mom-and-pop can’t match.
When a local shop can get a part in 24 hours because it’s plugged into a national distribution network, that’s the machine working in your favor. Then again, fewer competitors means less consumer choice, which usually, ultimately, leads to a worse experience or higher prices.
But it’s worth being honest about what’s happening. The Pep Boys deal isn’t a one-off. It’s one more brick in a wall that a small number of companies—most of them steered by private equity—have been building for years. The signs out front still say a dozen different things. Behind them, the number of actual decision-makers keeps shrinking.
So the next time you pull into your favorite quick-lube lane, now you know who actually runs it. More and more often, the answer is: one of the six companies in this post.
Have insight into the auto service or aftermarket business? Drop me a line at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.