Why Foss Group is consolidating its dealership and leasing units

What began as a single General Motors store in Toronto in 1962 has grown into three high-volume dealerships, a real estate development and property management company and a national leasing platform that manages more than 50,000 vehicles across Canada.

But to write its next chapter, the newly unified Foss Group of Companies is leveraging the strengths of each of its businesses to offer something it says competitors can’t.

“Our plan is to grow our rooftops, but we’re doing it in a way that isn’t growth for the sake of growth,” said James Ricci, CEO of Foss Group of Companies.

“We can play across the full vehicle lifecycle … from vehicle access, through funding, through the ownership and ultimately the resale and remarketing.”

Foss Group consolidated its standalone business units under a single banner in October. The goal is to leverage the company’s unique footprint and keep up growth as Canada’s auto retail market consolidates, Ricci said. Planning for a future in which alternatives to traditional vehicle ownership could become commonplace is another rationale.

Ricci is the third generation of Foss to hold the reins, following his mother Karen Foss and grandfather Roy Foss.

Growing national presence

The group’s dealerships are concentrated north of Toronto. Its longstanding footprint consists of a high-volume GM store in Thornhill and one in Woodbridge.

Foss added Aurora Chrysler in 2025, a deal that generated gains for its leasing business.

A large portion of Foss’s fleet clients are last-mile delivery drivers that use short-term rentals, Ricci said. The new addition, with a large lot on the outskirts of the Greater Toronto Area, came with benefits.

“Instead of storing vehicles off-site or using other depots . . . we didn’t own, we could actually bring a lot of that value on-site and actually distribute the vehicles through that location while also capturing the reconditioning value.”

The Aurora addition is a blueprint Ricci said the company will look to replicate elsewhere. Along with Toronto, Foss National Leasing has offices in Vancouver, Calgary and Laval, Que., and plans to use the locations as “hubs” to grow its portfolio of new-vehicle dealerships.

The group is also looking to add new brands to its roster to enable the group’s dealerships to deliver a wider array of vehicles to its leasing arm.

“Foss National purchases a lot of vehicles across the country, and we want to make sure that we are agnostic … about the different car brands that we recommend,” Ricci said.

Changing consumer needs

As electrification, autonomous technology and alternatives to vehicle ownership gain traction, Foss is positioning itself to be “part of that future,” Ricci said, forming a venture arm to invest in early-stage auto, fleet and mobility technologies.

Growing momentum among consumers for subscriptions that offer “vehicle access” versus vehicle ownership is generating new opportunities in the short-term rental and leasing space, he said.

Increasingly, not all buyers need vehicles for six or seven years, Ricci said. On the fleet side, a customer might need a truck for a specific project, while another consumer might need a car for the summer.

“In our experience, these opportunities are incremental — not cannibalizing the existing sales.”

Over the long-term, the group anticipates the vehicle-subscription business and autonomous-vehicle market will collide, creating opportunities for fleet managers willing to take the lead, Ricci said.

“Somebody is going to have to own these vehicles if a consumer or business doesn’t want to.”

Tim Dimopoulos contributed to this report.