Earlier today, we reported the highest adjusted third-quarter earnings in company history at $11.21 per share, a 63% over last year's strong results.
Record revenues of $6.2 billion were primarily driven by successful navigation of the abnormal supply and demand environment and contributions from acquired businesses.
During the quarter, total revenue grew 70%, while total gross profit increased 83%.
On a same-store basis, used vehicles let our revenue growth up 40%, followed by a 22% increase in F&I income, a 7% increase in Service, Body and Parts revenues, and a relatively modest 3% decrease in new-vehicle revenues.
Additionally, same-store gross profit increased 23%.
In the third quarter, we generated $530 million in adjusted EBITDA, greater than any full-year in our history before 2019, providing us additional capital to deploy toward network expansion and Driveway, while also accelerating our continued exploration into adjacencies.
Our plan to reach $50 billion in revenue and exceed $50 in earnings per share by the year 2025 from here on referred to as our 2025 plan, was designed with these and other consumer trends in mind.
Beyond the Lithia & Driveway channels, are complex, expansive, and difficult to replicate design that we have incrementally unveiled over the past 15 months, today includes green cars, the foremost educational marketplace for sustainable vehicles, a quickly growing FinTech Driveway Finance, growing fleet in leasing operations, and a Canadian presence to establish the seeds for international growth, longer term.
For the third quarter, these Lithia websites and associated online shopping experiences connected with 11.5 million quarterly unique visitors.
These Lithia e-commerce customers accounted for 36,600 or 25% of all units retailed in the quarter, and simply estimated at $5.9 billion of annualized revenues attributed to the e-commerce portion of our traditional Lithia channel.
To put this into perspective, these e-commerce sales as a percentage of monthly unique visitors, represents a 0.32% or what we call a golden ratio.
To further illustrate the strength of our omnichannel strategy, when our LAD total sales are compared to unique visitors from all channels, our golden ratio was 1.46%, nearly 5 times more successful than our digital used-only peers.
Internally, we view the 2025 plan as a base case and our leaders are focused on taking our execution to the next level and de-linking $1 billion of revenue to produce more than $1 of EPS.
Key drivers of this are no further equity capital raises meaning no further dilution to EPS, leveraging our underutilized network to support a 2 times to 3 times increase in vehicle sales, and a 4 times increase in parts and service sales through the existing network.
During the quarter, DFC originated 6,200 loans, and now has a portfolio of $530 million.
Important to note is that a loan originated with Driveway Finance earns 3 times the amount earned when we arrange financing with a third-party lender on a fully discounted basis.
We believe that Driveway Finance can penetrate 20% of refinanced [Phonetic] retail unit sales.
Driveway generated over 530,000 monthly unique visitors in September, a 68% increase over June.
96% of our customers were incremental and had never a transaction with Lithia or Driveway before.
Monthly shop transactions increased 86% during the quarter.
Strong Google and Facebook reviews and a net promoter score of 90 indicate Driveway is building an online reputation for exceeding consumer expectations for a fully digital, frictionless experience.
We recently launched Driveway marketing in Las Vegas and Phoenix, our 9th and 10 markets.
Driveway is on track for its 2021 target of 15,000 annual transaction run rate exiting December.
Looking forward to '22, we are forecasting 40,000 transactions with a 2.2 to 1 sell-to-shop ratio.
In our future state, we expect our optimal physical network to be approximately 500 stores across the US, placing us within 100 miles of all US consumers.
While several large deals were announced recently, the automotive retail industry remains highly fragmented and unconsolidated with the market share of the 10 largest groups at only about 10%.
We have nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue commitments as well as over $12 billion in the pipeline, which excludes our peers' large transactions.
We remain confident in our ability to find deals that best fit our regional network strategy and are priced at our disciplined 15% to 30% of revenues, and 3 times to 7 times EBITDA.
This ensures we meet our after-tax return threshold of 15% in a post-pandemic profit environment.
Lithia and Driveway are known in the industry as the buyer of choice, obtaining manufacturer approval, timely in certain closing of transactions, and retaining over 95% of the employees.
During the quarter, we completed acquisitions that are expected to generate $1.7 billion in annualized revenues, and year-to-date, we have completed $6.2 billion.
We also expanded our US footprint, particularly in the Southeast Region 6, entering the Atlanta, Georgia and Mobile, Alabama markets.
We have grown exponentially, while maintaining industry low leverage of around 2 times, for nearly a decade.
This includes ensuring that our 22,000 associates continue to lead the digital transformation of automotive retail in their respective markets, while exceeding customer expectations, increasing market share, and improving profitability.
As a result, same-store new vehicle unit sales decreased 3% in revenue and 14% in units, consistent with the nationwide SAAR decrease.
We were able to offset the decreased volume with higher total variable GPUs, averaging $7,446 in the third quarter compared to $6,082 in the second quarter of 2021, and $4,754 in the prior year.
As of September 30, we had a 24 days supply of new vehicles on the ground, which excludes in-transits.
While the new vehicle day supply environment was challenging, our 58 days supply of used vehicle inventory exiting June 2021 positioned us well for the third quarter, where we saw a 40% increase in revenue on a 13% increase in units.
Our 1,000-plus procurement personnel did excellent work sourcing vehicles, enabling us to offer customers a wide spectrum of vehicles, meaning all levels of affordability.
We currently sit at a 48 days supply of used units and anticipate we will be able to continue to mitigate pressure on the new vehicle supply by maintaining solid used car comps and strong profitability.
In the third quarter, we saw a 74% of our used vehicles direct from consumer, such as trade-ins and off-lease, where we as top-of-funnel franchise dealers get first look at the used vehicle inventory pipeline.
Only 26% of our vehicles were procured from other channels such as auctions, other dealers, or wholesalers.
During the third quarter, we earned $3,897 in gross profit on used-vehicle sourced from customer channels, which turns in an average of 33 days.
For used vehicle sourced from other channels, on the other hand, we earned $2,696 in gross profit per unit, and those turned in an average of 51 days, which again, demonstrates the benefits of an omnichannel strategy for Lithia & Driveway.
We offer vehicles that meet all affordability levels, but the largest number of bulk manufacturer certified pre-owned vehicles and those priced under $10,000, or are over 10 years old.
Additionally, our internal dealer trade network, which creates an opportunity for our own network to have first shot at the 100,000 units we wholesale annually, allows us to cost-effectively move vehicles to better match supply and demand, and increase our retail versus wholesale mix.
Same-store revenues increased 7.3% over last year.
We believe that these actions reduce our normalized SG&A levels at least 300 basis points below pre-COVID levels, or to approximately 65% of gross profit.
For the quarter, we generated over $530 million of adjusted EBITDA, a 104% increase over 2020.
And $304 million of free cash flow defined as adjusted EBITDA plus stock-based compensation, less the following items paid in cash: interest, income taxes, dividends, and capital expenditures.
We ended the quarter with $1.7 billion in cash and available credit, which if deployed to support network growth, could purchase up to $6.8 billion in annualized revenues.
As of September 30, we have $3.8 billion outstanding in debt, of which $1 billion was floor plan and used vehicle and service loaner financing.
The remaining portion of our debt primarily relates to senior notes and financed real estate as we own over 85% of our physical network.
Our disciplined approach is to maintain leverage between 2 times and 3 times as part of our commitment to obtaining an investment-grade credit rating, which would be another sizable competitive advantage once obtained.
As of quarter-end, our ratio of net debt to adjusted EBITDA is 1.25 times.
We target 65% investment in acquisitions, 25% internal investment including capital expenditures, modernization and diversification, and 10% in shareholder return in the form of dividends and share repurchases.
With capital raises completed earlier this year and elevated free cash flows generated as a result of the current environment, we accelerated our investment in Driveway and DFC, incurring over $50 million in SG&A and capital expenditures, year-to-date.
The personnel cost for our over 500 associates who support the scaling and continued build-out of Driveway and DFC; the marketing investment for Driveway; and IT development cost, or current period headwinds.
We are well-positioned for accelerated, disciplined growth on the path toward achieving our plan to reach $50 billion of revenue and exceed $50 of earnings per share by the year 2025.

Summary:
Earlier today, we reported the highest adjusted third-quarter earnings in company history at $11.21 per share, a 63% over last year's strong results.
During the quarter, total revenue grew 70%, while total gross profit increased 83%.
During the quarter, we completed acquisitions that are expected to generate $1.7 billion in annualized revenues, and year-to-date, we have completed $6.2 billion.