Automotive PR Agencies 2026: The Buyer's Reference

Part of EPR's Automotive & Mobility coverage. Related: Toyota Still Owns Auto AI, Automotive Recall Communications Benchmark 2026, The Automotive Publications AI Engines Cite Most.

The automotive PR agencies that actually specialize in the category in 2026 are Bianchi PR, MBE Group, Lambert (now LLYC U.S.), Kahn Media, and Identity PR, with Edelman and APCO holding the largest automotive practices by revenue. Eisbrenner Public Relations no longer exists as an independent firm, and Lambert is now majority owned by Spain's LLYC. Only Bianchi PR publishes pricing: a $10,000 project minimum and an $80,000 to $200,000 annual retainer.

Ford issued 153 recalls in 2025 covering 12,926,436 vehicles, more than the next nine automakers combined. The federal EV tax credit expired September 30, 2025, and BEV share of U.S. light-duty sales fell to 6% in Q2 2026. The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs on February 20, 2026, and left the Section 232 auto duties in force. Hearst now owns Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, MotorTrend and Hot Rod. Each of those facts changes who an automotive brand should hire and what it should ask that agency to do.

Rebuilt August 2026. Originally published November 2015. Rewritten September 18, 2026.

What Changed in the Agency Landscape Since 2015?

Most automotive agency lists still in circulation, including the version of this page that stood until today, were assembled a decade ago and never re-reported. Three of the five firms those lists name have changed corporate identity, and one no longer exists at all.

A shortlist naming Eisbrenner or Lambert Edwards has not been reported this decade.

Which Firms Actually Specialize in Automotive PR?

Two distinct groups make up the category, and buyers routinely confuse them. The first is the Michigan mobility specialist bench: small, supplier-heavy, and deeply networked in Detroit. The second is the large generalist firms with automotive practices, where the category's revenue actually sits.

Bianchi PR, Troy, Michigan

Jim Bianchi, APR, founded Bianchi PR in 1992, and the firm remains independently owned. Five senior practitioners carry a collective 115-plus years in the category. Supplier-side and B2B mobility is the specialty: advanced propulsion, electrification, and connected and autonomous systems, rather than OEM consumer launch. Current clients include SAE International, Schaeffler, MTU, Freudenberg, Cooper-Standard, Yanfeng and Adient; the firm states it works with eleven of the top North American automotive suppliers. Bianchi PR belongs to the Public Relations Global Network.

Bianchi PR is the only firm in this category that publishes pricing: a $10,000 minimum project budget and an $80,000 to $200,000 annual retainer. Treat that band as the working reference point for a Detroit supplier-side program, because no other specialist in this list discloses rates.

MBE Group, Bloomfield Township, Michigan and San Rafael, California

MBE Group is the merged Marx Group and Eisbrenner PR entity, formed in April 2019. Eisbrenner was founded in 1985; Marx Group in 1984. The firm runs roughly 10 to 49 staff across two offices and belongs to IPREX. Its sectors run wider than cars: automotive and aftermarket, trucking, marine, defense, aerospace and RV. The January 2025 Growth Machine acquisition added SEO and content capability, a signal worth reading since aftermarket and dealer-adjacent clients now buy search and content alongside earned media. MBE Group does not publish pricing.

Lambert (LLYC U.S.), Grand Rapids, Detroit, New York, St. Louis, Phoenix

Lambert is the largest Michigan-headquartered firm in the category and the only specialist that appears in O'Dwyer's automotive ranking, at fifth place with $6,270,000 in 2025 net fees. Founder Jeff Lambert sits on LLYC's global executive committee. Automotive and mobility is a stated core specialty alongside aerospace and defense and M&A work. The LLYC acquisition gives a Michigan agency Iberian and Latin American reach that no other firm on this list has, relevant for any program touching Mexican manufacturing or Brazilian markets. Lambert does not publish pricing.

Kahn Media, Moorpark, California

Dan Kahn, a former Edmunds.com editor, founded Kahn Media in 2008. The firm is the enthusiast and aftermarket specialist rather than the Detroit corporate one. Clients have included Lotus Cars and Maserati as exclusive agency of record, plus Rolex Watch U.S.A., Roush, Nitto Tire, the Petersen Automotive Museum, SEMA and Galpin Motors. Kahn Media acquired TREAD Agency in 2022 for outdoor and overland coverage and operates The Garage Agency. An enthusiast media, motorsport, aftermarket, or lifestyle-adjacent brief belongs on this bench; an OEM crisis or supplier B2B brief does not.

Identity PR, Birmingham, Michigan, plus Chicago and Tampa

Identity PR was founded in 1998 and remains independent, with 36 employees per O'Dwyer's. The firm moved from Bingham Farms to Birmingham; older listings still show the old address. Its Tampa office sits at The Motor Enclave, an automotive campus. Automotive and mobility clients named publicly include DENSO, Neapco, Escalent, Urban Science, SME and Bollinger Motors. Identity PR runs a genuine digital practice alongside earned media as a HubSpot solutions partner, unusual in this set. The firm does not publish pricing.

Marx Layne & Company, Farmington Hills and Grand Rapids, Michigan

Michael Layne and the late Frederick Marx founded Marx Layne in 1987. The firm lists 25 employees and describes itself as Michigan's largest independently owned PR agency. Named automotive clients include Detroit Axle and ARaymond, but automotive sits alongside cannabis, restaurants, elder care, law firms and real estate in a roughly fourteen-vertical practice. Marx Layne is a credible Michigan generalist, not an automotive specialist in the way Bianchi or Kahn Media are.

Allison Worldwide

Allison Worldwide holds a 2026 credential the specialist firms do not have. On February 4, 2026, Allison was named official public relations partner for the North American Car, Truck and Utility Vehicle of the Year awards. Rebecca Lindland, previously of Cars Commerce, Fisker, Cox Automotive and IHS Automotive, leads Allison's global automotive practice. Allison is part of Stagwell, with Detroit, New York and Los Angeles offices.

5WPR, New York, Miami and Tampa

5WPR runs an independent automotive marketing and PR practice covering brand strategy, dealer and OEM communications, executive positioning, media relations and influencer partnerships. The firm's broader technology PR practice has ranked among O'Dwyer's top fifteen independent U.S. firms since 2017. 5WPR also runs a GEO and AI-visibility research arm that covers the automotive category, including a retrieval study on which sources anchor AI answers about vehicle pricing, safety and reviews. Automotive sits alongside 5WPR's other vertical practices rather than as a single-category specialist bench like Bianchi or Kahn Media; the fit is closer to a national consumer and technology-forward agency than a Detroit supplier specialist. Full practice details sit on 5WPR's automotive marketing and PR agency page.

What Do the Largest Automotive PR Practices Actually Bill?

O'Dwyer's publishes the only ranked revenue table in the category, and its 2025 automotive and transportation ranking runs by net fees as follows.

Rank	Firm	Location	2025 net fees
1	Edelman	New York, NY	$31,863,000
2	APCO	Washington, DC	$20,600,000
3	Lee Andrews Group	Los Angeles, CA	$9,049,687
4	Ruder Finn	New York, NY	$8,100,000
5	LLYC U.S. (Lambert)	Grand Rapids, MI	$6,270,000
6	Jackson Spalding	Atlanta, GA	$4,007,410
7	French | West | Vaughan	Raleigh, NC	$3,046,988
8	Zeno Group	New York, NY	$2,693,085
9	Coyne PR	Parsippany, NJ	$2,557,646
10	LaunchSquad	San Francisco, CA	$2,050,000

Read that table with one caveat: O'Dwyer's rankings are self-reported and opt-in. Bianchi PR, Identity PR, Marx Layne, MBE Group, Kahn Media and 5WPR do not appear in it at all. Absence is not evidence of size. It is evidence that a firm chose not to file. Any agency search that treats this table as a complete market map will miss the entire Michigan specialist bench and other independents.

What Is the Actual State of the EV Transition in 2026?

Most automotive communications programs are still briefed against 2022 assumptions about EV adoption, and the 2026 data contradicts those assumptions directly.

• The $7,500 federal clean-vehicle tax credit expired September 30, 2025.
• Battery-electric vehicles hit 12% of U.S. light-duty sales in September 2025, an all-time record and a pull-forward month driven by the expiring credit.
• BEV share fell to 6% in Q2 2026, down from 7% in Q2 2025. Plug-in hybrids fell from 1.9% to 1.4% over the same period.
• Hybrids hit a record 16% of U.S. light-duty sales in Q2 2026.
• 2025 was the first year on record in which both U.S. annual BEV sales and BEV market share declined, and the trend continued into 2026.

The communications consequence is direct. A messaging architecture built on inevitability, that electrification is coming and buyers should get ready, now runs against the buyer's own experience of a market where the incentive disappeared, the share is falling, and hybrids are winning. Programs that cannot talk credibly about hybrids, range anxiety, charging economics and residual values are briefing against a market that no longer exists.

How Do Tariffs Affect an Automotive Communications Program in 2026?

Section 232 automotive duties took effect May 3, 2025, covering passenger vehicles, light trucks and specified parts. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariff programs in Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, invalidating the "Reciprocal" and "Trafficking and Immigration" regimes on major-questions and statutory grounds.

The Section 232 auto and parts tariffs were not affected and remain in force. The opinion does not reach Section 232 or Section 301. A replacement program was announced under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Published accounts of the applicable rate conflict, and refunds against the invalidated IEEPA duties remain unresolved pending guidance.

For communications teams, this is the most under-managed exposure in the category. Pricing announcements, plant-investment messaging, supplier negotiations and dealer communications all now sit downstream of a live legal question. A statement that characterizes tariff costs as settled may need correcting.

Where Are Chinese Automakers Actually Competing?

Chinese automakers are not, so far, competing in the United States, and communications programs should stop implying otherwise without evidence.

• BYD delivered 557,090 battery-electric vehicles in Q2 2026 against Tesla's roughly 396,500 to 406,000, a gap of more than 160,000 units.
• For full-year 2025, BYD delivered 2,256,714 BEVs to Tesla's 1,636,129, overtaking Tesla in global BEV sales.
• BYD expects 1.5 million overseas sales in 2026, ahead of its own 1.3 million target, concentrated in Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
• Chinese brands reached a record 14.2% of Europe's battery-car market in 2026 despite EU tariffs.
• Chinese OEMs have announced ten European plants since September 2023, concentrated in Turkey, Hungary and Spain. BYD faces a 17% EU tariff, SAIC faces 35%, and SAIC's EU sales have nearly halved from their 2023 peak.

The narrative to manage in 2026 is European share and manufacturing localization, not a U.S. market entry that has not happened.

Why Is Recall Communications Now the Category's Largest Workload?

Ford issued 153 recalls in 2025 across Ford and Lincoln, covering 12,926,436 vehicles, more than the next nine automakers combined at 12,902,842. That number shattered Ford's own record of 89 recalls set in 2024. Toyota was second by count at 15 recalls covering 3,223,256 vehicles; Stellantis was third at 53 recalls and 2,776,952 vehicles. Industry-wide, 2025 produced 472 recalls affecting 28,185,976 vehicles.

Ford has stated that roughly 80% of its recalls are software issues fixable over the air. That distinction is the single most important framing argument in modern automotive crisis communications, and most programs deploy it badly. A software recall and a mechanical recall are the same regulatory event and a completely different consumer event. Explaining that difference credibly, before the recall happens, is the actual work.

On the autonomy side, NHTSA escalated its Tesla Full Self-Driving investigation to an Engineering Analysis on March 20, 2026, covering 3.2 million vehicles. That step sits one below a recall demand and focuses on the system's handling of degraded visibility under camera-only Tesla Vision. Waymo has issued four recalls in two years, including 3,791 vehicles in May 2026 for driving into standing water and 3,871 vehicles in June 2026 for entering active freeway construction zones. GM wound down Cruise as a public robotaxi challenger after the 2023 San Francisco pedestrian incident.

Who Do You Actually Pitch Now That Hearst Owns the Category?

Hearst acquired MotorTrend Group from Warner Bros. Discovery on December 12, 2024. Hearst Autos now owns Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, Bring a Trailer, MotorTrend, Hot Rod and Automobile, with reach cited at more than 30 million monthly users and Brad Rosenfeld as SVP and general manager of the Autos Group.

The old playbook treated Car and Driver, Road & Track and MotorTrend as three separate pitch targets with three separate relationships and three shots at a launch. They now share one owner and one ad sales organization. A media plan that still counts them as independent outlets is triple-counting its own reach.

Three more changes matter in the trade press. WardsAuto merged with Automotive Dive in October 2025 into a single redesigned site under Informa TechTarget, and legacy URLs from both publications were retired, worth auditing if a newsroom or media kit still links to either. Crain Communications still publishes Automotive News, but Crain cut roughly 25 staff across its publications in November 2025, including reductions at Automotive News and Crain's Detroit Business, meaning fewer reporters and a higher bar for the pitches that do land. Static Media acquired Jalopnik, announced February 2025, not Keleops, which bought Gizmodo and Kotaku; Jalopnik operates with a full masthead, and The Autopian, founded by former Jalopnik staff, is now a real destination in its own right.

How Are Car Buyers Using AI Engines, and Are Dealers Ready?

Cox Automotive's AI in Auto Retail Tracker, published August 11, 2026, is the best-sourced dataset in the category, surveying 483 to 504 dealers and roughly 1,500 consumers across the first half of 2026.

• 63% of vehicle shoppers plan to use AI for their next purchase.
• 24% say AI makes them feel more prepared walking into a dealership.
• 82% of dealers use AI tools, but only 29% have begun adapting to AI-powered vehicle search.
• The share of dealers who admit they need to adjust but have not started rose from 26% to 32%.
• One in three dealers do not measure AI's impact or do not know how, and only 22% of AI users report sales growth.

That gap, 63% of buyers arriving through AI against 29% of dealers adapting to it, is the clearest commercial argument in automotive communications right now. A brand described accurately inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews reaches a buyer who has already formed a shortlist before any dealership or brand site gets involved. EPR's own modeling in the automotive citation share study puts Toyota at the top of that layer, with Tesla, Honda and Ford following. 5WPR's own Automotive Media AI Retrieval Rankings reaches a related conclusion from the source-tier side: Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds anchor pricing queries, and NHTSA and IIHS anchor safety queries, ahead of the automotive editorial press.

How Should You Choose an Automotive PR Agency in 2026?

1. Match the bench to the brief, not the brand name. Supplier and B2B mobility work goes to Bianchi or Identity. Enthusiast, motorsport and aftermarket work goes to Kahn Media. Multi-market corporate and public affairs work goes to Lambert/LLYC, Edelman or APCO. National consumer and technology-forward programs, including GEO and AI-visibility work, sit closer to a firm like 5WPR. These benches are not interchangeable.
2. Ask what happens on recall day. With 472 industry recalls in 2025, recall communications is not a contingency line in the scope; it is the scope. Ask for the on-call structure, the OTA-versus-mechanical messaging framework, and two named examples.
3. Ask for the tariff position. An agency that cannot explain the difference between the invalidated IEEPA tariffs and the surviving Section 232 duties should not write your pricing communications.
4. Get the pricing in writing, and benchmark it. Only Bianchi publishes: a $10,000 project minimum, an $80,000 to $200,000 annual retainer. Use that as the floor reference for a specialist program and make every other firm justify a variance.
5. Audit the media plan for the Hearst consolidation. A proposal that counts Car and Driver, Road & Track and MotorTrend as three independent wins is a decade out of date.
6. Ask how the agency measures AI visibility. With 63% of shoppers planning to use AI, an agency without a Citation Share methodology is measuring a shrinking part of the buyer journey.

Related EPR Coverage

• Automotive & Mobility, the category hub.
• Toyota Still Owns Auto AI, 28 brands, five engines, 64 prompts.
• Automotive Recall Communications Benchmark 2026
• Ten Auto Crises the AI Engines Still Remember
• The Automotive Publications AI Engines Cite Most
• Bianchi PR: Automotive and Mobility Agency Profile
• Automotive Marketing Strategy: The 2026 Playbook
• PR Firms Directory

Sources

O'Dwyer's 2025 PR firm rankings, automotive and transportation. U.S. Energy Information Administration, light-duty vehicle sales data published July 27, 2026. Supreme Court of the United States, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., February 20, 2026. NHTSA investigation records, March 2026. Carscoops and iSeeCars 2025 recall analyses. Cox Automotive AI in Auto Retail Tracker, August 11, 2026. LLYC acquisition announcement, February 19, 2024. Marx Group and Eisbrenner merger announcement, March 28, 2019. Hearst and Warner Bros. Discovery MotorTrend transaction, December 12, 2024. Static Media acquisition of Jalopnik, February 2025. Agency websites for leadership, client and pricing disclosures.