The American love affair with cars started almost as soon as Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the assembly line, and it hasn’t stopped yet. However, Americans are now able to make better informed decisions about their cars through research – particularly online searches.
Google released its annual Trends report in 2014, and the search engine reported that Ford was the most-searched brand in the U.S. followed by Jeep in second. Dodge cam in third. Toyota, the world’s biggest-selling carmaker in 2014, came in fourth in the U.S.
But what about now? How do the automakers stack up globally and domestically in searches from April 2014 to March 2015? TopSpeed determined to find out.
Here are the global results of the study.
The study conducted features Google searches of car brands performed using the Latin alphabet. Data for each country included the highest search volume per month and the car brands matching that search volume. Countries that had an average monthly search volume of less than 100 weren’t included.
As far as North America went, Canadian and U.S. Internet users seemed to favor Toyota. However, users in Mexico seem to favor both Nissan and Chevrolet.
In just a few months, Toyota managed to move from the fourth most-searched carmaker in the U.S. to the first, but the results are more complicated than they appear. The data begins to get really interesting when you break down the search data by state.
In the U.S., the search results were mostly regional. Toyota was the most-searched car brand along the West and East coasts and in the south. In the North and the Midwest, Ford dominated. In states that had a tie, the brands were most often Ford and Toyota.
However, Toyota was the most-searched automaker in only 24 of the states. While it seems that the car brand is here to stay, Americans haven’t given up their other favorite brand – Ford.
To see the detailed results of other continents in the study, check out topspeed.com.
