When it comes to automobiles, geography is destiny. What we drive is determined in large part by where we’re driving. Sometimes the locational preferences are almost laughably stereotypical, like the prevalence of Subarus in Vermont and pickup trucks in Montana. Electric vehicles are favored in left-leaning enclaves, Jeep Wranglers excel in parts of Arizona, and Sprinter vans rank high in resort towns. The hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai — which is sold only in California — ranks at the top of all vehicles in both Los Angeles and Orange counties.
But when you delve deeper into our database of 1.7 million car listings, all sorts of geographic quirks emerge. Mississippi, for example, is the poorest state in the country. Yet in and around the state capital of Jackson, where per capita income exceeds the national average, five of the 10 most popular cars are Mercedes-Benzes. And up and down the California coast, a wide range of counties that share else little in common — including San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Marin — feature only foreign-made cars in their top-10 lists.
Then there’s the question of hometown advantage. For the most part, we found, Americans love the cars they help to build. In Rutherford County, Tennessee, where the nearby Nissan plant cranks out 2,500 vehicles a day, four of the 10 most popular cars are Nissans. In Dearborn, Michigan — the headquarters of Ford — five of the 10 favorite cars are Fords. (And none are foreign.) Sometimes the name alone is enough: In the Michigan county of Wexford, which centers around the town of Cadillac, the Cadillac DeVille ranks No. 6.
But there are some exceptions to the company-town rule. Nine of the 10 most popular cars in Spartanburg, South Carolina, are foreign — yet not a single one of them is a BMW, whose nearby plant employs 100,000 people. And in Alameda County, California, whose Fremont plant turns out most of the country’s Teslas, not a single one of the 10 favorite vehicles is a Tesla. The top EVs in the county where Elon Musk makes his EVs? The Toyota Prius and the VW eGolf.
The cars your neighbors love the most
Text by Mark Healy, founder of Flipturn Creative Studios. Data by Andrew Thompson, creator of Components, a cultural research project. Graphics by designer Dan DeLorenzo and data graphics fellow Kim Nguyen. Photo research by Isabel Fernandez Pujol.
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