OPENLANE Brand Guidelines: KAR Global’s 2023 Rename, a 2011 Buy & One Name for Three Markets

A bought name becomes the company name.

OPENLANE — written in capitals — is the name under which the Carmel, Indiana, company formerly known as KAR Global runs its digital wholesale marketplaces for used vehicles. The legal entity was KAR Auction Services, Inc., which traded as KAR Global. On 2 May 2023 it announced a rebrand, and its corporate name changed to OPENLANE, Inc. on 15 May 2023, according to the company’s press release and to Inside INdiana Business, which reported the change the same day.

The name is older than the rebrand. Inside INdiana Business reported that KAR bought OpenLane Inc., a California-based online auto auction company, in 2011, and kept the brand as one of several names for its online marketplaces. The same report noted that Peter Kelly, chief executive since 2021, joined KAR through that acquisition. In the 2023 announcement Kelly said KAR “catalyzed the digital transformation of remarketing” through the OpenLane purchase, so it was “fitting” to anchor the company’s next era on that brand.

KAR’s earlier history runs through physical auction lanes. The company priced its initial public offering in December 2009, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “KAR” on 11 December 2009, according to its press release of 10 December 2009. For a decade it also owned the salvage auction business Insurance Auto Auctions; KAR completed the separation of that business, IAA, Inc., as an independent listed company on 28 June 2019, the company said.

The move away from physical lanes came next. KAR agreed in February 2022 to sell its ADESA U.S. physical auction business to Carvana, and completed the sale on 10 May 2022, according to the company. The deal covered all ADESA U.S. physical auction sites, with operations and staff at 56 locations, plus exclusive use of the ADESA.com marketplace in the United States. KAR kept its OPENLANE off-lease platform, the BacklotCars and CARWAVE dealer-to-dealer marketplaces in the U.S., TradeRev in Canada, ADESA Canada, ADESA U.K. and ADESA Europe, and the floorplan lender AFC.

One name for every lane.

The 2023 rebrand was a consolidation as much as a name change. The company said OPENLANE would serve as both the parent brand and the go-to-market brand for its marketplaces in the U.S., Canada and Europe, and described the change as part of its shift to “a more asset-light, digital marketplace company.” It launched a new corporate website at corporate.openlane.com alongside the announcement.

The rollout went market by market. Canada came first: in June 2023 the company combined ADESA Canada and TradeRev into a single OPENLANE marketplace. In Europe it had already merged the ADESA Europe, ADESA UK and GWListe dealer-to-dealer platforms into one marketplace, and in November 2023 ADESA Europe announced its rebranding to OPENLANE Europe, trading at openlane.eu on the continent and openlane.co.uk in the UK. In the U.S., the company said in November 2023 that it had launched a marketplace combining BacklotCars with its exclusive off-lease inventory under the OPENLANE name.

Not everything was folded in. Inside INdiana Business reported that the rebrand did not include the financing business AFC, which kept its own name, and that branding for services such as the AutoVIN inspection business and the CarsArrive shipping service would be reviewed later. AutoVIN was renamed OPENLANE Inspections in September 2025, according to the company, while AFC, CarsArrive and Velocicast still appear under their own names on its brands page.

The investor brand followed last. The stock kept the ticker “KAR” after the 2023 rename; in December 2025 the company announced a move to “OPLN” on the New York Stock Exchange from 26 December 2025, a change Kelly said would align “our investor brand with OPENLANE’s corporate brand.” The company’s stated purpose since the rebrand is to “make wholesale easy” so that its customers can be more successful, a line that now opens its corporate website.

Lanes, bids and valuations.

Vehicle remarketing firms sell cars that have already had a first life: lease returns, fleet cars, rental cars and, at the salvage end, vehicles written off by insurers. The companies in this group present much of their business through listings, photographs and data. VPauto, the French auction house, says it opened 3D photo studios in 2014 and shows each vehicle with close-up photographs and a defect record marked on a body diagram; IAA said in 2012 that its redesigned bidding tool let buyers view ten photographs of each vehicle at once.

Bidding and valuation tools sit at the centre of these brands. VPauto’s LIVE platform films the sale and takes online bids in real time while a licensed auctioneer runs the room, the company says. In August 2023 RB Global said its IAA business had released a vehicle score built from four corner photographs, a valuation model and a sales decision dashboard for sellers. IAA’s releases give those tools trademarked names, as they would products.

Consumer-facing names are newer. British Car Auctions’ parent launched cinch, an online used-car marketplace for private buyers, in July 2019, and English Wikipedia says cinch has held naming rights to the Scottish Premiership since the 2021–22 season. VPauto has staged themed sales, including an auction of electric vehicles only at Caudan in March 2026, reported by Bevolt.

Corporate pages tell a story of owners and sites. RB Global presents IAA as one of its brands and says IAA joined it in 2023; Constellation Automotive Group, renamed in 2020, owns BCA; and VPauto lists eight sale sites across France. This guide draws on those owner pages, site lists and dated press reports, and marks what rests on a company’s own word.

Capitals across three markets.

On scale, the company gives its own figures. Its corporate site says its marketplaces sold about 1.5 million vehicles in 2025, that it is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, and that it has more than 90 operating locations across North America, Europe, the Philippines and Uruguay, serving customers in about 40 countries. Its about page says the marketplaces bring together carmakers, dealers, fleet operators, rental companies and financial institutions, and describes the business as a technology company, a data company and an innovation company. Inside INdiana Business reported in May 2023 that the company then had about 4,500 employees and had sold 1.3 million vehicles in 2022.

Readers should note that the ADESA name for U.S. auction sites now belongs to Carvana, which bought those sites and exclusive U.S. use of ADESA.com in 2022. OPENLANE itself trades at openlane.com in the U.S., openlane.ca in Canada, openlane.eu on the European continent and openlane.co.uk in the UK, with corporate and investor pages at corporate.openlane.com.

For a design guide, OPENLANE shows how a company can retire a long-used holding-company name and promote a product brand it bought more than a decade earlier to stand for the whole group, rolling it out one market at a time. Compare Carvana, which bought the ADESA U.S. auction business from KAR in 2022, and Manheim, another wholesale vehicle auction name. For this guide we use an ink blue and a lane teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep OPENLANE’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.