It turns out Toyota rules the world, Russians are in love with Hyundai, Honda has Canada on lockdown, and Mini’s real big in Southeast Asia.
Here’s a fun infographic: UK auto parts retailer Quickco analyzed the car brands most Google-searched in 2016 from each country it could get data from—excluding outliers like North Korea, Iran or Cuba, of course. Here are the results from 193 countries. To see a full-res version of the map, click here.
As Quickco’s blog post notes, a few trends here: national brand loyalty isn’t very strong, except in Germany, Italy and France (even Japan is really into BMWs), for its massive size most countries don’t seem all that interested in General Motors, Jaguar got the most searches in Belize, and in Niger, everyone dreams of Bugattis.
One caveat, if you’re curious:
We were given one small caveat by the web team. While we used Google to perform our analysis, Google is not the most used search engine in some large economies such as China, Russia and South Korea, so these samples will not be as reliable as they would be had we used local search engines. However, Google does still have a large presence in these populous nations, so the proportions of searches will probably be similar.
Is it the most scientific study in the world? I dunno, probably not, and it almost goes without saying this doesn’t equate to sales. But it’s fun to see where everyone’s minds are at.
See more trends from the map over at Quickco’s blog.
Correction: Like the dumb American I am, I mistook Germany for Spain on this map. Spain had the most VW searches, not Germany. The post has been updated.