Toyota’s Innovative Dealer Environmental Excellence Program

DEEP is Toyota’s voluntary initiative to reduce the environmental impact from its North American dealer operations. DEEP provides an easy-to-implement process for automotive dealerships to reduce energy and water use, carbon emissions and operational costs. It provides technical assistance and incentives to Toyota dealerships and recognizes them for positive environmental performance as well as local community outreach. Continuous operational improvement is targeted in energy, water and waste. Participating dealerships can earn up to five stars across several categories by tracking environmental performance data and implementing improvement projects, then achieving minimum performance benchmarks that are aligned with the Toyota Environmental Challenge 2050.

The DEEP pilot was launched in April 2021. Sixteen dealerships are currently participating, from California to New Mexico, New Hampshire and Florida. These dealerships are finding substantial value. On average, dealers are achieving an average 14% energy use reduction, 7% water use reduction, and realizing cost reductions of $14,300 per year. In total, dealers have reduced carbon emissions by 830 metric tons of CO₂e- the equivalent carbon emissions sequestered by 982 acres of forest in one year - and saved over 6.6 million gallons of water.

In 2022 – during the second year of the pilot – the program and participating dealers’ performance is gaining momentum. Going forward, Toyota is actively inviting more dealerships to enter the DEEP program to help Toyota deliver on its commitment to improve the environmental impacts of its dealer sales operations and drive net positive impacts for society.