Manufacturers Offering the Best After-Sales Service in 2025

While it’s usually possible to test drive a model before buying it, you’ll only find out the quality of its manufacturer’s after-sales service after the fact. Automobile Magazine has conducted a survey to help you find out how you’ll be treated.

To win new customers, offering well-finished models that appeal is essential. But to hope to keep these buyers, it’s far from enough. Unlike a television or a washing machine, a car needs regular maintenance. You will therefore most often have to visit the manufacturer’s workshops at least for the entire duration of the warranty. Even if European legislation allows you to have your service done elsewhere without losing the benefit of this coverage, few of you are unfaithful during this period. More and more brands are even trying to keep you afterward. Launched in 2021, the Toyota Relax program has attracted imitators. It consists of offering a year of extended warranty… on the condition that your vehicle is serviced by the network. The gift is therefore not without interest. The goal is to prevent customers from leaving for an auto center or independent garage as soon as they feel free to do so. Dacia, Peugeot, Nissan, and Citroën have all imitated this model, with more or less attractive conditions.

More and more manufacturers are offering to extend the warranty in exchange for maintenance in the network, like Citroën.

More and more manufacturers are offering to extend their warranty in exchange for maintenance carried out within the network, like Citroën. © Citroën

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A reinforced methodology

Born over 25 years ago, our after-sales service survey is more relevant than ever, even if it doesn’t claim to be perfect. The treatment you receive can still vary greatly from one garage to another, or even from one contact to another. To try to evaluate each manufacturer as fairly as possible, we revised our methodology in our previous survey . The “customer satisfaction” rating, which has a much higher coefficient than the others, is now based on our reader-ambassadors who visited the brands’ workshops during the twelve months preceding our survey. More than 1,200 of them responded to a very detailed questionnaire, which allowed us to properly gauge the temperature among the 17 manufacturers for which we collected sufficient data. The “proximity to the network” and “workshop availability” ratings have not changed for several years. For the first, we always base ourselves on the number of service points, provided by the manufacturer following our requests. The second is directly derived from this since it is based on the ratio between the number of workshops and the brand’s new car registrations between 2021 and 2023.

Unfortunately, our study doesn’t contain all good news. With a few exceptions, such as Citroën and Skoda, manufacturers are tending to reduce their network. Renault-Dacia and Peugeot are still doing well, both of which maintain an exceptional territorial coverage, with more than 3,000 workshops for the former. But for Toyota, which just ended 2024 with exceptional sales in France, the number of service points currently seems quite insufficient to avoid lengthy delays. The Japanese brand thus falls out of the top 10 despite consistently high satisfaction. Fortunately, the Japanese brand can at least count on the reliability of most of its models to avoid unexpectedly clogging up its lifting bridges. It is also working on solutions to reduce waiting times by three . The situation is not much better at BMW-Mini, while Volkswagen, Hyundai, Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo are doing barely better. As we feared last year, the “network availability” rating is therefore down. It is at the same, fairly average, level as the “network proximity” rating.

Here is the 2024 list of the best garages in France according to a specialist comparison site

Satisfaction still good but decreasing

However, it’s our “customer satisfaction” indicator that benefits from the highest coefficient. We observed highly variable results, even within the same automotive group, with a few surprises. The overall level remains good. But the slightly declining general average should still encourage manufacturers to be vigilant. When a customer leaves after a bad experience, it’s often impossible to win them back. You can find the full ranking in issue 945 of L’Automobile Magazine .

Mazda, a mixed record

After returning to our ranking last year, and without making any splash, Mazda once again delivers a mixed performance. On the one hand, the size of the network appears sufficient to prevent the 115 workshops from being overwhelmed given the number of vehicles sold in France. On the other, it remains too modest to prevent some customers from having to travel many kilometers for each service or repair. Mazda owners also consider themselves very well received, and a majority find the price of parts and labor very reasonable. However, they are far from being as enthusiastic as Honda about the quality of after-sales service…