What Does NAPA Stand For & Who Owns The Auto Parts Company?

With 100 years of service officially under its belt, NAPA Auto Parts easily ranks among America's oldest automotive retail outlets. Like many of its competitors, NAPA boasts origins in the Detroit area, coming into being to help support the booming auto industry of the 1920s. Over the ensuing decades, the brand has expanded far beyond its Michigan roots and currently boasts storefronts in all corners of the United States.

Given that fact, it's likelier than not that you have, at some point in time, stepped into a NAPA store to secure some underrated but necessary tool or one of the many vital fluids your vehicle needs to keep running. It's even likelier that you did so without having the slightest idea that NAPA is actually an acronym. Indeed, those four letters refer to the group of independent auto parts sellers that founded the company in its early days. Once they aligned as business partners, they became the National Automotive Parts Association.

Said association came into being to build stronger distribution networks for businesses and consumers, whose reliance on cars and trucks was rapidly growing. The concept has been a rousing success, with NAPA now distributing hundreds of thousands of products to more than 6,000 NAPA-branded stores and 18,000-plus Auto Care Centers throughout the country, many of which are owned by Genuine Parts Company. There's little reason to think that might change at any point soon, either, with NAPA continuing to expand the brand.

As one might expect with a brand that's been around in some capacity for a century, the ownership history of NAPA Auto Parts is not all that straightforward. Interestingly, many of the brick-and-mortar stores across the United States bearing its iconic logo exist outside of any corporate body. In fact, according to NAPA's website, "most" of the stores that are currently part of its distribution network are independently owned and operated.

Despite that, many of the NAPA stores out there are actually owned by an outfit called Genuine Parts Company, or GPC for short. As it happens, Genuine Parts Company has long been intertwined with NAPA, with GPC founder Carlyle Fraser playing a key role in NAPA during its formative years. Not surprisingly, Fraser began snapping up NAPA stores not long after his GPC came into being in 1928, and the company continued to do so for the better part of the past century. In 2012, GPC became the last member of the original NAPA consortium, which is now essentially a subsidiary of Carlyle's company.

Most recently, GPC added another 181 NAPA stores to its slate of holdings by acquiring Motor Parts & Equipment Corporation, also known as MPEC. MPEC stood as the largest owner of independent NAPA stores in the United States at the time of the 2024 acquisition, with outposts located in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. With the pickup, it's safe to assume GPC is now the biggest name in the NAPA game.