Total Car Score makes it easy to see how any car stacks up against its primary competitors through an engaging user interface. Check it out! Total Car Score ; The Most Efficient and Effective Automotive Shopping Tool Total Car Score takes the high-level ratings from the most authoritative automotive sources and converts them into a single scale (for data geeks, this is called “normalizing the data”). In this instance, the scale is a simple percentage number representing what the car could have scored from each authoritative source versus what it did score. Some sources use a 1-10 scale while others use bubbles, circles or stars. While unique, these rating systems can all be converted into a percentage number. From there Total Car Score simply averages the number from all of these sources to get a vehicle’s Total Car Score. If a vehicle has ratings from only three or four sources we don’t consider its Total Car Score validated, but we will show it as a “preliminary” Total Car Score. If it has less than three ratings we won’t give it a Total Car Score at all.