Why Ontario's OMVIC and CPD prep is broken in 2026 (and what we're building)

OMVIC’s Continuing Professional Development program went live on April 1, 2026. From July 1 onward, every Ontario dealer registration that comes up for renewal needs an annual CPD pass at 80%. Salespeople renew CPD every two years, on the same threshold. The Automotive Certification Course that new dealers and salespeople have to clear runs at 80% effective January 1, 2026: 12 weeks, 60 questions in 90 minutes, open-book against a single hardcopy manual.

Roughly 8,000 registered dealers and 30,000 salespeople in Ontario now have a recurring exam touchpoint with real consequences. Miss your CPD before renewal and the registration auto-expires; you can’t trade vehicles until OMVIC reinstates it. We covered the full mechanics on the CPD page and the certification page.

The prep tools that exist today were built for a different reality. We think the gap matters, and we’re building DealerPrep to close it.

What’s actually out there

The official side is two channels. Georgian College delivers the Automotive Certification Course with a hard-copy student manual you study and then carry into the exam. OMVIC’s CPD runs through their portal at omvic.ca once the 90-day window opens before your renewal. Both are competent. Neither is designed for daily practice on the device you actually carry.

The third-party prep market filled the gap unevenly:

• Quizlet community decks: free flashcards covering the course manual, quality wildly variable, no source citations, no curation. Useful for flash recall, useless for actually understanding the regulation behind a rule.
• CourseTreeLearning: paid study guide and sample questions, available in digital and hardcopy formats. No in-app interactivity around an iOS or Android app.
• Examzify and similar web-first practice apps: paid practice tests delivered primarily through the browser, with mobile apps available. We have not found in-app links back to the underlying MVDA, Code of Ethics, or General Regulation text on the public pages.
• UCDA’s Frontline training: in-person and online OMVIC education for dealers and salespeople, with a Key Elements pathway for grandfathered registrants. Solid as instructor-led training; not a daily self-study tool for new applicants.

Common pattern: they all answer “did you memorize?” None of them answer “do you understand the section of the MVDA that this is testing?”

Where the existing tools fall short

Three problems we kept hitting:

1. No citations. Ask why the answer to “What price has to be in the ad?” is “all-in” and the third-party tools say “because OMVIC says so”. The actual answer is O. Reg. 333/08, s. 36(7), and once you read s. 36(7) the rule clicks in a way that won’t fade. Without that link, prep is rote and you’re studying twice: once to pass, once again when something goes wrong on the lot.

2. Nothing you can just open and use. Ad-supported quiz sites want an account and a tolerance for banners; the PDF crash courses want the money before you have seen a single question. A dealer with ten minutes at the service drive should be able to open a browser, answer a set, and read the section behind every answer, without signing up for anything. None of the current options let you.

3. No regulatory feed. OMVIC publishes discipline decisions and the Licence Appeal Tribunal publishes appeals every quarter. They show in plain numbers what OMVIC is actually enforcing. Most dealers see headlines once a year and forget. We think the feed is the daily diet that turns “I memorized the rule” into “I understand the rule because I just read the case where it cost a dealer $25,000”.

What DealerPrep does differently

We’ve built three things into v1, all consistent with the same opinion: prep should ground you in the actual legislation, open in a browser with nothing to sign up for, and stay current with what OMVIC is enforcing this month.

Practice that cites the law. Every question links to the MVDA section, the Code of Ethics rule, the General Regulation paragraph, or the OMVIC bulletin it’s testing. Press the citation chip in the explanation and you land on the actual section text, on this site. The reference covers the Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, Code of Ethics regulation, General Regulation, the Consumer Protection Act, and the other Acts and regulations dealers actually touch (PPSA, HTA, RSLA, Sale of Goods Act, plus their main regulations). Searchable, linked from questions, never paywalled.

Mock exams that match the real format. 60 questions, 90 minutes, 80% to pass for certification practice. The CPD format runs the same 80% threshold with a 4-6 hour content scope; we model both. Every sitting is a fresh draw across all 17 topics, so no two sittings hold the same questions. A free account sits the 30-minute mock as often as it likes, so you can try the format before paying anything, and the legislation reference is open either way. Lifetime access opens all three mocks: 30, 60 and 90 minutes, as many sittings as you want.

A compliance feed, not headlines. Every week we draft a small number of compliance posts: a real OMVIC discipline case, a Licence Appeal Tribunal decision, an OMVIC bulletin, summarised in plain English with the MVDA section the dealer or salesperson tripped on. They are free to read at /compliance, no account and nothing to buy. The feed is already live with several decisions and bulletins, and more land every week.

Quiet by default. Practising here needs no account: the free questions, the study guides and the legislation are open to anyone. Make an account and it stores your answers and your results, and you can clear or close it yourself from your profile. No advertising, no behavioural tracking, nothing sold on. The site measures page traffic with Google Analytics. The privacy page is the full list: what an account holds, what is kept after you close one, and why.

What DealerPrep isn’t

Plain about this so it’s not surprising:

• We are not the official course. Only Georgian College delivers the certification course. Only OMVIC delivers REVS for CPD.
• We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OMVIC, the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement, or Georgian College.
• Passing inside DealerPrep is not a passing grade for any official assessment.
• Our questions are sourced from public legislation and OMVIC’s published guidance. We do not paraphrase or bundle the copyrighted student manual.

DealerPrep is the practice surface around the official course, not a replacement for it.

What we’re shipping

The website is the product, and it is live. The free practice questions, the topic study guides, the diagnostic and the legislation reference are open to anyone with no account. An account records what you answer and scores you by area; lifetime access opens the full bank, the timed mocks, the drill sets and the flashcards. The compliance feed runs alongside all of it.

If you want to follow the regulatory side and nothing else, the compliance feed updates weekly and the legislation pages link straight into the section text. There’s a one-email-a-month subscribe form at the bottom of the home page if you’d rather get OMVIC bulletins and CPD changes pushed to your inbox.

We’re building this because the existing options have gaps and the regulatory expectation just stepped up. The next eighteen months matter for every Ontario dealer and salesperson; we want the practice tool that makes that easier to actually exist.