From Subarus in Vermont to Dodge Rams in Montana, what we drive is shaped by where we live
Explore the United States of Automobiles
• See where in America your vehicle is most popular
• What our rides reveal about our politics
• Cars used to be really colorful. What happened?
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.