About

The record, not the campaign

Page last revised 2026-08-05

The Franchise Record is an independent reference publication covering motor-vehicle franchise law in the United States — the 2009 General Motors and Chrysler dealer terminations, the Section 747 arbitrations that followed, and the state statutes that govern manufacturers and dealers today.

Who publishes this site now

The Franchise Record is new. It is privately and independently owned, it began publishing at this address in 2026, and it is the only publisher of anything that appears here today. It has no corporate parent. It is not a dealer association or a member of one, not a law firm, not a trade group, not a lobbying organisation, not a political campaign, and not a dealership or any business that sells vehicles, parts or services. No advertiser, sponsor, litigant or other outside party has any say over what is published.

Editorial responsibility sits with a single editor, who can be reached at editor@hometownautodealers.org. Anything factual on this site can be challenged at that address, and the corrections log records what happened when it was.

The Committee to Restore Dealer Rights is not connected to this site

This domain was used from 2008 to 2011 by the Committee to Restore Dealer Rights, a campaign run by franchised dealers after the 2009 bankruptcies. That campaign is a subject this publication covers. The Franchise Record is not the Committee, is not affiliated with it, is not endorsed by it, is not its successor, and has republished none of its material. The registration lapsed in 2011 and the domain passed through several unrelated owners before it was acquired for this publication in 2026.

The Committee’s campaign ended. It stopped publishing in December 2009, the month Congress enacted the arbitration provision that became Section 747 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010 (P.L. 111-117, 123 Stat. 3219), and it has not published since. Nothing on this site is a continuation of it, an endorsement of it, or a request on its behalf. There is no petition here, no action alert, no contact-your-senator form, and no donation button. This publication accepts no contributions and takes no position.

The distinction matters more than it may look, because a reader following a 2009 news article or an encyclopedia footnote to this address is looking for the Committee, and would otherwise reasonably assume that the site they landed on is the Committee still running. It is not. Saying so plainly, on every page, is the point of the line that sits in the footer of this and every other page here.

Why this archive exists

In the spring of 2009 two manufacturers ended thousands of franchise agreements in about seven weeks, by two different legal routes, during two federally supported bankruptcies. Congress responded, but not with the bill that was introduced. What passed instead was a seven-month arbitration program with a remedy most people still misdescribe. The litigation it produced was still generating appellate opinions fifteen years later.

The documentary record of all of this is unusually good and unusually scattered. The audit, the report to Congress, the hearing transcripts, the enrolled statute, the bankruptcy opinions and the bill histories exist in public, in full, in five different places, and almost nothing written about them assembles them in one spot with the citations attached. Meanwhile a large part of the secondary coverage is wrong in the same few ways: a bill that never became law is described as enacted, two different and both-correct counts of terminated General Motors dealerships are used interchangeably, and a decision to refuse dismissal is reported as a ruling on the merits.

So this site is an archive of record. It exists to put the primary documents, the numbers and the distinctions in one place, in a form a dealer’s family, a lawyer, a legislative staffer, a librarian or a reporter can cite, and to say clearly which questions the record answers and which it does not.

There is a second reason, which is the address itself. Backlinks and footnotes from 2009 still point here. An archive of record does not move the addresses that were cited, so the pages those citations point at will be answered at those exact addresses, with original work on the same subject, rather than redirected away or left dead.

The through-line

State law says a manufacturer may not simply cast off the dealers who sell its cars. Three times now, something has gone around that rule. In 2009 it was the Bankruptcy Code. In 2010 it was a federal arbitration statute. In 2026 it is a corporate affiliate. The rule keeps losing to whoever has the better structure.

Method

• Primary sources first. Analysis links the statute, the opinion, the docket entry or the audit — not a news story about it. Where only trade press exists, the sentence says so.
• Every number carries its source and its date in the same sentence or the caption beside it. No orphan statistics.
• Where credible sources disagree, both are printed with attribution, and the reason for the difference is given — or the page states that neither source gives one.
• Unknown is said out loud. Where the record does not answer a question, the page says the record does not answer it rather than filling the gap with an inference dressed as a fact.
• Distinctions are kept. A proposed bill is not an enacted law; a filing is not a decision; an allegation is not a finding; a holding is not dicta; eligible, filed and won are three different numbers.
• No first-person experience is claimed, ever. Nobody at this publication lost a dealership, sat in a Section 747 arbitration or testified before a congressional committee, and no page here will suggest otherwise. Where this subject needs a human voice, the voice belongs to a named person in the public record, quoted and cited.
• None of the previous publisher’s text is reproduced at any address on this site, including the pages about the Committee itself. Government works — statutes, opinions, hearing transcripts, audits — are quoted at length because they are public and because quoting them is more honest than paraphrasing them.
• Private contact details found in the archive are not published. The people involved are living people.

This publication has no position on whether the 2009 terminations were justified, on whether Section 747 was good policy, or on how any current case should come out. Pages set out considerations; they do not make recommendations. Nothing here is legal advice, and no page evaluates any reader’s own situation.

Funding and independence

This site sells nothing. It carries no affiliate links, runs no lead generation, publishes no dealership directory and takes no contributions or donations. No advertising is running today; the intended revenue source is ordinary display advertising, and the full explanation is on how this site is funded. Nobody pays for coverage, and advertising has no bearing on what is published.

Corrections

An archive of record that edits itself silently is not one. Every substantive correction is logged with the date, the page, the error and the fix at /corrections/, and the corrected page links back to the entry. Reports of errors are welcome at editor@hometownautodealers.org.