Tony Wang9 min readTake 5, Meineke, Maaco, and CARSTAR Are the Same Company. You Probably Didn't Know That.
One public company (Driven Brands) owns Take 5, Meineke, Maaco, and CARSTAR — four brands that read as unrelated auto shops.
Two posts ago, this series found that Sonic, Arby's, and Dunkin' — three fast food brands that occupy completely different menu categories — are all owned by the same private-equity conglomerate. Auto repair turns out to run the identical pattern, twice over, with two separate consolidators competing for the same territory.
Driven Brands: one public company, four "different" businesses
| Brand | What it looks like | US listings | Dataset category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Take 5 Oil Change | Quick oil changes | 1,289 | oil_change_service |
| Meineke | General repair, tune-ups | 826 | auto_repair_shop |
| CARSTAR | Collision repair | 493 | auto_body_shop |
| Maaco | Auto body paint | 346 | auto_repair_shop |
Combined, these four brands account for 2,954 listings in this dataset — and every one of them is designed to read as a standalone, local-feeling business. Take 5's branding leans on speed and convenience; Meineke markets itself as a full-service neighborhood shop; Maaco and CARSTAR both trade on decades of independent-sounding brand history (CARSTAR was founded in 1989, Maaco in 1972, long before Driven Brands existed as a holding company). None of the four names hints at common ownership, and unlike this series' earlier storefront-lending finding — where the "hidden" chains all shared a product category — these four don't even compete with each other for the same repair job.
Driven Brands is a real, publicly traded company (NYSE: DRVN), headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, describing itself as the largest automotive services company in North America. Its own FY2025 reporting cites approximately $1.9 billion in net revenue from $6.1 billion in system-wide sales across 4,200+ US locations — a scale that puts it well above any single brand it owns.
Mavis Tire: the second consolidator, and a deal that closed 8 days ago
Midas checks in at 890 listings in this dataset (category=auto_repair_shop), a plausible undercount against Mavis's own reported ~1,300 franchised Midas locations — consistent with the pattern this series has repeatedly found where a recency-sorted or category-scoped search doesn't capture every physical location. Pep Boys' own dataset count proved harder to isolate cleanly: a category-scoped search returned only 147 (clearly too low against its real ~800-950 locations), while an unscoped search returned 7,991 (clearly too high, likely picking up unrelated listings the same way "Repair" or "Burger" have contaminated other categories in this series). Rather than force a number that doesn't hold up, Pep Boys' real-world count here comes entirely from the Mavis acquisition's own public reporting.
Jiffy Lube: a real, unresolved gap — disclosed, not hidden
| Query | Result | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| q="Jiffy Lube" (no category filter) | 7,569 | Too broad — likely picking up some unrelated matches alongside genuine ones |
| q="Jiffy Lube", category=oil_change_service | 4,419 | Properly scoped — still ~2.1x Jiffy Lube's own reported ~2,080 US locations |
| Jiffy Lube's own reported figure | ~2,080 | Per public reporting as of March 2026 |
This is a smaller-magnitude version of a pattern this series first documented with Planet Fitness's gym listings (there, a 6.7-8.3x overcount blocked that post entirely). Jiffy Lube's gap is more modest — roughly 2.1x, not 7x — and duplicate listings were specifically checked for and ruled out in a sample. The timing offers one plausible, though unconfirmed, explanation: Shell sold Jiffy Lube to private-equity firm Monomoy Capital Partners for $1.3 billion in March 2026, ending a 24-year run as a Shell subsidiary. A brand-wide ownership transition is exactly the kind of event that can trigger bulk listing updates, re-verifications, or temporary duplicate entries during a systems migration — but that's a plausible explanation, not a confirmed one, and this post reports the discrepancy as an open question rather than either hiding it or blocking the whole piece over it.
The brands that check out cleanly
| Brand | Dataset listings | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Midas | 890 | Mavis Tire (private) |
| Meineke | 826 | Driven Brands (public, NYSE: DRVN) |
| Valvoline Instant Oil Change | 2,441 | Valvoline Inc. (public, NYSE: VVV) |
| Firestone Complete Auto Care | 4,765 | Bridgestone (Japanese public company) |
How we did this, and the caveats
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Brand-specific counts | Direct q= search per brand, scoped to category=auto_repair_shop or category=oil_change_service where the brand's name risked collision with a generic word in its natural category |
| Real-world store counts | Each company's own public reporting (Driven Brands' FY2025 results, Mavis/Icahn Enterprises' 2026 Pep Boys transaction filings, Jiffy Lube's own location-count reporting) |
| Ownership structure | Driven Brands' own SEC filings and public reporting on the Mavis-Pep Boys and Shell-Jiffy Lube-Monomoy transactions |
| Duplicate check (Jiffy Lube) | 100-record Texas sample checked for exact-address and exact-coordinate duplicates; none found |
Caveats worth stating plainly: this post reports brand-level counts, not a full domain-classification sample the way most posts in this series do, because auto-service brands split across multiple Google Maps categories (auto_repair_shop, oil_change_service, auto_body_shop, tire_shop, auto_parts_store) in ways that make a single unifying category-wide sample less reliable than checking each brand individually against its most relevant category. The Jiffy Lube discrepancy (~2.1x) is disclosed as unresolved, not corrected or explained away — the Shell-to-Monomoy ownership transition is offered as a plausible timing correlation, not a proven cause. Pep Boys' dataset count could not be cleanly isolated at all — its real-world figure here comes entirely from Mavis's own acquisition reporting, not from this dataset. Mavis's full brand portfolio beyond Midas and Pep Boys (Express Oil Change, Brakes Plus, Tire Kingdom, NTB, Town Fair Tire, Tuffy) is not independently verified against this dataset in this post — those brand names were sourced from public reporting on Mavis's history, not checked here. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing, so a re-pull months from now, especially after the Pep Boys integration settles, may show different numbers.
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Frequently asked questions
Who owns Take 5, Meineke, Maaco, and CARSTAR?
All four are owned by Driven Brands, a publicly traded company (NYSE: DRVN) headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, that describes itself as the largest automotive services company in North America. In this dataset, the four brands combine for 2,954 US listings spanning four different service types: quick oil changes (Take 5), general repair (Meineke), auto body paint (Maaco), and collision repair (CARSTAR).
Who owns Midas and Pep Boys?
Both are owned by Mavis Tire, a privately held company. Mavis completed a $700 million acquisition of Pep Boys from Carl Icahn's Icahn Enterprises on August 20, 2026, folding roughly 800 Pep Boys locations in with Midas's existing ~1,300 franchised locations under the same ownership.
Why does Jiffy Lube's Google Maps listing count not match its real store count?
This dataset shows 4,419 US Jiffy Lube listings within category=oil_change_service, roughly 2.1x Jiffy Lube's own reported ~2,080 US locations. A 100-record sample found no duplicate addresses or coordinates, so the exact cause is unconfirmed. One plausible, unproven explanation: Shell sold Jiffy Lube to private-equity firm Monomoy Capital Partners for $1.3 billion in March 2026, and an ownership transition of that scale can trigger listing churn.
Is auto repair as consolidated as fast food?
It shows the same structural pattern this series found in fast food: brands that read as independent competitors are frequently owned by the same parent company. Driven Brands' four-brand combination (2,954 listings) and Mavis's Midas-plus-Pep Boys combination (roughly 1,700+ real-world locations per public reporting) show this is a genuine industry-wide pattern, not a one-off.
Which auto-service brand counts in this dataset are the most reliable?
Midas (890), Meineke (826), and Valvoline Instant Oil Change (2,441) all land close to their publicly reported real-world store counts. Pep Boys could not be cleanly isolated in this dataset at all (its count here comes entirely from Mavis's own acquisition reporting), and Jiffy Lube's count carries an explicit, disclosed ~2.1x discrepancy caveat.