Tony Wang10 Min. LesezeitTake 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 | 1,400 | 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 3,056 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 1,137 listings in this dataset, against Mavis's own reported ~1,121 — a 0.99–1.01x match. An earlier version of this post put it at 890, an undercount produced by scoping the query to a single category; Midas listings also carry tire_shop and auto_parts_store tags. An independent exact count over the full index puts the same brand at 1,116 by website domain, confirming the corrected figure rather than the original one.
Jiffy Lube: an "anomaly" that turned out to be our own query
The first version of this post reported Jiffy Lube at 4,419 US listings against its ~2,080 reported locations and called the 2.1x gap an unresolved discrepancy, offering the March 2026 Shell-to-Monomoy sale as a plausible cause. That was wrong, and the way it was wrong is worth showing.
This dataset's text search matches either word in a two-word brand name. So q="Jiffy Lube" was
never counting Jiffy Lube — it was counting every oil-change shop in America with "Lube" in its name,
plus a small brand-specific remainder. The test that proves it takes one extra API call: re-run the
query with the brand word replaced by a string that cannot exist.
| Query (category=oil_change_service, US) | Result |
|---|---|
| q="Jiffy Lube" | 4,419 |
| q="Qwertyuiop Lube" — a brand that does not exist | 4,413 |
| q="Lube" — the bare token | 4,413 |
Counted properly — matching on the business name, then deduplicating by place_id — Jiffy Lube has
2,049 US listings against 1,999–2,080 reported, a 0.99–1.02x match. The state-level check is
just as close: 272 in California against 265 reported. There was never an anomaly, and the ownership
transition had nothing to do with it.
Two further details fell out of the recount. 3.7% of Jiffy Lube's listings sit on franchisee-owned
domains (jiffylubespecials.com, indianajiffylube.com, stcjiffylube.com), which is why counting
by corporate domain alone finds only 1,959 — a franchised brand leaks locations from a domain-based
census. And the comparison this section originally drew to Planet Fitness no longer holds: that
"6.7–8.3x overcount" was
the identical artifact on the word "Fitness", and the
dataset turned out to be accurate there too.
The brands that check out cleanly
| Brand | Dataset listings | Reported | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midas | 1,137 | 1,121 | Mavis Tire (private) |
| Meineke | 819 | 966 (2022) | Driven Brands (public, NYSE: DRVN) |
| Valvoline Instant Oil Change | 2,434 | 2,100+ | Valvoline Inc. (public, NYSE: VVV) |
| Firestone Complete Auto Care | 1,862 | ~1,700 | Bridgestone (Japanese public company) |
How we did this, and the caveats
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Brand-specific counts | Name match plus place_id deduplication, paging relevance-sorted results until several consecutive pages contain no match. Not a raw q= total, which counts either word of a multi-word brand |
| Contamination check | A control query per brand, substituting an invented word for the real one (q="Qwertyuiop Lube"). If the totals match, the number is measuring the generic word |
| 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 | Exact-address duplicates counted across every brand's full deduplicated set, not a sample: 7 for Take 5, 7 for Meineke, 0 for Maaco, 10 for Jiffy Lube |
| Correction history | Four counts were corrected on 2026-08-29: Jiffy Lube 4,419 → 2,049, Firestone 4,765 → 1,862, Midas 890 → 1,137, Take 5 1,289 → 1,400 |
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). That split is itself what produced one of the original errors — scoping Midas to auto_repair_shop alone missed the Midas locations tagged tire_shop and oil_change_service, undercounting the brand by 21%. Counting by corporate domain is not a safe fallback either: it undercounts franchised brands whose franchisees run their own sites (Jiffy Lube 1,959 by domain against 2,049 by name), and it over-trims brands like Midas whose name is a common word. The method that survived all four errors is name match plus place_id deduplication, with a control query to prove the name is not generic and a domain breakdown used only to classify what the name found. 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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Häufig gestellte Fragen
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 3,056 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?
It does match. An earlier version of this analysis reported 4,419 listings against ~2,080 real locations and called the 2.1x gap unresolved. That was a query artifact: the dataset's text search matches either word of a two-word brand, so the query was counting every shop with 'Lube' in its name. A control query for the invented brand 'Qwertyuiop Lube' returns the same 4,413. Counting by name match with place_id deduplication gives 2,049 US listings against 1,999-2,080 reported, a 0.99-1.02x match, with California at 272 against 265 reported.
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 (3,056 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?
After a 2026-08-29 recount, all of them. Midas 1,137 against 1,121 reported, Meineke 819, Maaco 344, CARSTAR 493, Take 5 1,400, Valvoline Instant Oil Change 2,434 against 2,100+, Firestone Complete Auto Care 1,862 against ~1,700, and Jiffy Lube 2,049 against 1,999-2,080. Four of these were corrected from the original version: the errors were in how the dataset was queried, not in the dataset. Pep Boys still could not be cleanly isolated and its figure comes from acquisition reporting.