The dealer ran my credit seven times (or I went to seven different dealers and they each pulled my credit once) – and my credit score dropped 50 points.
The truth is that credit inquiries make up a very small portion of your credit score, and credit scoring algorithms recognize how common it is to rate shop, or to shop at multiple dealers.
For this reason, multiple inquiries of the same type within a reasonable period of time (generally 14-30 days for auto financing, depending on the score model) are scored as a single inquiry.
This may or may not cause a small drop in your score, generally in the single digits, which is temporary.
Most people do not check their scores immediately before and immediately after an inquiry, either, so if you note a 50-point swing in your credit scores the week after your auto lease application, but you last looked at your score 30 days ago, there were also ~40 days’ worth of other changes in your credit report.
Also, this may be obvious, but comparing your post-rate-shopping score to a pre-rate-shopping score that was derived from a different score model is a useless comparison.