Our own data · Used car lots

Your Spanish-speaking buyer opens your website and finds no Spanish. That's what 36 of the 40 car-lot sites we could read showed.

About 185,000 people in Solano and Sonoma counties speak Spanish at home. On October 23, 2026, I opened the home page of 67 independent used-car lots in Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties. I could read 40 of them. Only 4 showed any Spanish. In Solano County, it was 0 of 19.

Solano: 0 of 19 lot websites we could read had any Spanish.

About 86,000 neighbors speak Spanish at home.

By Alejandro Ojeda, Napa, CA · October 23, 2026

What I checked

On October 18, 2026, I built a list of independent used-car lots in Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties. Only lots I could confirm in at least two public sources made the list. That's 67 lots. No franchise new-car dealers.

On October 23, I opened each lot's home page one time, the way a phone browser would. Then I looked for any sign of Spanish on that page:

a line like "Se habla español" or "Hablamos español,"
an "Español" link, or a Spanish version of the site,
a page set to Spanish in its code.

I only count what was on the page. No lot is named here. Totals only.

The numbers, step by step

67 independent used-car lots on the list.
66 had a website. One had none I could find.
40 home pages I could actually read. The other 26 blocked my reader or wouldn't load (details in the limits below).
36 of those 40 had no Spanish anywhere on the home page. That's 90%. (20 of the 36 carry code for a translate or accessibility add-on. See the limits below.)
4 had some Spanish. 2 said they speak Spanish. 2 linked to a Spanish version of the site.

County by county

County	Lots on the list	Home pages I could read	With any Spanish	People who speak Spanish at home*
Napa	3	2	0	33,918 (26.6%)
Solano	33	19	0	86,419 (20.1%)
Sonoma	31	19	4	99,048 (21.4%)
Total	67	40	4

* U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, table C16001 (people age 5 and over), read through Census Reporter on October 23, 2026. These are survey estimates with a margin of error: about ±5,700 people for Solano and ±5,300 for Sonoma, and about ±4,300 / ±4,900 for those who speak English less than very well.

What surprised me

Solano was a shutout. 0 of the 19 Solano home pages I could read had any Spanish. Solano has about 86,000 people who speak Spanish at home.
The Spanish was on Instagram, not the website. In my October 18 review, one Solano lot said "Hablamos español" in its Instagram bio. Its website home page said nothing in Spanish. A buyer who finds the lot on Google lands on the website, not the bio.
The platform may already do it. Both lots that link to a Spanish version carry code from Carsforsale.com's dealer-website platform. I found that platform's code on 22 of the 40 home pages I read. 2 of those 22 linked to a Spanish version. The other 20 didn't. My take: if your site is on that platform, ask whether yours can do it too.
Counting every check I did, it's still rare. Add the October 18 review (home and contact pages, plus Instagram bios) and 6 of the 67 lots showed Spanish anywhere I looked.

What lots are missing

My take, from reading these results:

Not every Spanish speaker needs Spanish. Most speak English too. But the Census also counts the ones who don't speak it "very well": about 35,000 people in Solano and 43,000 in Sonoma. That's about 4 in 10 of the Spanish speakers in each county.

Buying a car means a loan, a contract and a down payment. That's the moment people want to read it in the language they think in. If your home page is English only, that buyer has no sign you'll take care of them. The lot down the road that says "Se habla español" can get that call instead.

You'd never see it happen. They don't call to tell you they left.

What a fix looks like

My take, in the order I'd do it:

One honest line on the home page. If someone on your lot speaks Spanish, say "Se habla español" near the phone number. Only if it's true. A buyer who calls and gets English only will feel tricked.
Ask your website company if they offer a Spanish version. Two lots in this study already have one on a common dealer platform. It may be a setting, or it may cost extra. Ask before you build anything new.
Translate the pages that close deals first. Financing, what to bring, trade-ins, and how to reach you. Have a person who speaks Spanish read it before it goes live. Machine translation alone can turn "down payment" into nonsense.
Match your Instagram and your website. If your bio says "Hablamos español," your website should say it too.

More on getting a used car seen: used car dealer marketing.

What this check can't tell you

Home page only. A lot can have Spanish deeper in the site, on a car listing or a financing page. I counted only what the home page showed.
26 of 66 sites I couldn't read. 19 sent back an "access denied" answer to my reader (18 of those 19 block pages came from one dealer-website company's servers). 3 stopped at a security error or dropped the connection. 4 loaded almost no text without running scripts. A shopper's phone may see those pages fine.
Translation add-ons. 20 of the 36 home pages with no Spanish carry code for a Google Translate box or an accessibility add-on that loads by script. That includes 11 of the 19 Carsforsale.com pages with no Spanish. I didn't count those as Spanish. On one archived copy I opened in a browser, the translate box was empty and showed nothing. If a lot has that box turned on, a buyer could pick Spanish there, and my count would be too low.
Napa is thin. Only 3 independent lots made the list, and I could read 2. Don't read anything into Napa's 0.
The list leans toward lots that sell online. 64 of the 67 lots have a listing on CarEdge, which lists dealers that publish inventory online. A cash lot with no online inventory is under-counted.
Speaking Spanish at home is not the same as buying a car. The Census counts people, not car buyers. I didn't measure calls or sales.
One day. Websites change. This is what the pages showed on October 23, 2026.

Want to know what a Spanish-speaking buyer sees on your site?

Send me your website. I'll look at it the way that buyer would and tell you what I see, in English or Spanish. Free.

Email alejandro@ojedaworks.com

It comes straight to me, Alejandro, in Napa.