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The Most Popular Cars in American Cities
- TheBiv 11y agoThe article should be titled "The Most Popular Cars in American Cities that YourMechanic services"
- vacri 11y agoNo, it really shouldn't. This complaining about every title that isn't caveated to hell and back is getting really tedious. It's the YourMechanic website. They're up-front about the source of the data, and specify that source on every table. How much spoon-feeding are people going to demand?
- magicbuzz 11y agoI had no idea that you could get a Subaru with a V8 engine.
- douche 11y agoSubaru people has a big overlap with crazy gearheads, so that could be a little non-standard... My cousin has a Legacy that he's put a snowplow rig on, which is a lot more effective than you might think.
- seanmcdirmid 11y agoIt was a typo in the article. They didn't change the table title from V8 to Subaru. I'm surprised Colorado beat out Seattle, but then the latter doesn't really have snow unless you go east or skiing.
- maddymartin 11y agoGood catch - we're fixing that!
- nether 11y agoSaab 5-Sep is presumably the Saab 9-5.
- tosseraccount 11y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=excel+gene+names https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=excel+gene+names Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics. "The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names"
- mikeash 11y agoThere was a recent item in comp.risks about an Amber Alert broadcast using speech synthesis software, which asked listeners with information about the abduction to "call September 1, 2001."
- mosburger 11y agoI used to work for a startup in the same space as YourMechanic, and our vehicle databases actually mislabeled Saab 9-3's and 9-5's as 3-Sep and 5-Sep. XD
- maddymartin 11y agoWe're fixing this! Thanks for catching it. :)
- baldfat 11y agoNo state next to the city. Springfield - Mass? Bridgeport - CT?
- GabrielF00 11y agoI think by Bridgeport they actually mean Fairfield County. The city of Bridgeport is relatively poor. Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest areas in America.
- baldfat 11y agoI'm from Bethel and it is the sad that only a handful of friends were able to stay in Fairfield County. Most of us live somewhere else due to cost.
- dsr_ 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_%28toponym%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_%28toponym%29 tl;dr: there are a lot of Springfields.
- mosburger 11y agoPortland OR? (OK most people assume Oregon, but I'm from Portland Maine and this always makes me irrationally bitter).
- dsr_ 11y agoWho wrote this paragraph? "While some people prefer energy efficient cars, other drivers are more concerned that their car have a powerful engine. Almost 14% of the cars we service have an eight-cylinder V engine, more commonly known as a V8. V8 engines are more powerful than the four and six cylinder engines found in more than two thirds of the cars we service." This stands out as filler written by someone who doesn't speak English or Car.
- hammock 11y agoMore likely it's writing from someone whose editor has told them no acronyms are allowed without prior explanation, which is fairly common in journalism.
- jjp 11y agoOr it's been SEO'd to cover all the bases of related keywords.
- crispyambulance 11y agoAt first I thought it was on hacker news because the article was auto-generated by software (a "Show HN"), but actually, it appears to be written by a real person. Welcome to journalism in the era of dying newspapers, I guess.
- ryanSrich 11y agoIt's on HN because Your Mechanic is a YC company. A lot of readers blindly upvote anything YC related.
- eterm 11y agoHN is very opaque about how it ranks articles, I suspect that it's not only blind upvoting. If you look how articles move on hnranking, some move more naturally than others. This story in particular has a couple of very large boosts: http://hnrankings.info/11469285/ http://hnrankings.info/11469285/
- drpgq 11y agoI would be curious to see the breakdown for Canadian cities. Compared to America, Canadians really seem to like Chrysler.
- serge2k 11y agoVancouver, Honda Civic Everywhere else in BC mainland, Pickup (F-150/Ram) that'd be my guess for BC.
- spo81rty 11y agoThis American car index is great. Would be nice to see it based on where the actual cars are made though. Many American brand cars are made in Canada and Mexico. Just as many Hondas and Toyotas are made in America.
- wil421 11y agoAgreed and all BMW SUVs are made in South Carolina. Mercedes makes the larger SUVs (and some smaller ones too) in Alabama.
- other_herbert 11y agoAnd the new generation c class
- Loughla 11y agoI wanted to buy American when I was shopping for a family car recently. So I bought a Subaru Outback.
- Shengbo 11y agoWhats the reason for the percentage of American brands being lower in the Bay Area, NYC, etc.? Do wealthy areas just prefer imports or is there more to it?
- furyg3 11y agoMy guess would be: compact cars are more desired in very urban areas for many reasons (size when parking, fuel efficiency in an area where it is more expensive); less trucks (truck workhorses are overwhelmingly American); and a higher concentration of rich people so more German imports.
- Shengbo 11y agoI totally forgot about gas prices. Looks like some of these trucks can consume >15l/100km. I guess it only makes sense that we don't have them in Europe. Especially with recent emission regulations, downsizing, etc.
- pionar 11y agoPickup trucks. The #1 selling vehicles in the US year after year are pickup trucks. Those aren't really needed or desired (due to size) in places like NYC and SF. In the midwest, however, Pickup trucks are everywhere. In my suburban Detroit neighborhood, looking outside, probably half of the houses have a truck parked in the driveway. I'm thinking of getting one soon. I don't usually have a need for one, but a small old S-10 (Chevy) or Ranger (Ford) would be handy sometimes. It was the same when I lived in Indiana. I was in the minority driving a sedan. American trucks outsell the foreign competitors handily, though Toyota is catching up with the Tundra.
- alistairSH 11y agoI don't have any hard research, but I suspect it is mostly style and ego. BMWs are generally perceived as higher status and more stylish than Cadillacs. Edit - I speaking mostly of cars and middle-weight SUVs. Pickup trucks, as noted in a sibling, might skew the rural areas back to the domestic end of the spectrum. Part of that is a history of poorly constructed domestic cars (relative to Japanese imports, anyway). My personal experience bears this out... My most reliable car to date is a Lexus RX330. I owned a used Miata that was better than average. And a used Pontiac sedan that needed a new engine at 75,000 miles. I currently drive a Wrangler, and have my fingers crossed that it proves Americans can build reliable cars. Time will tell.
- furyg3 11y agoInteresting that nowhere in the article really examines the degree to which trucks are making the US/foreign difference. Even though the distinction between US/foreign has been greatly diminished in recent history, the workhorses of farms and rural areas are american (e.g. F-150). Cities are by definition not rural, but Oklahoma City is much closer to the rural lifestyle than, say, SF or NYC.
- sakri 11y agoThe local/import map looks similar to the red/blue state map.
- zeveb 11y agoPerhaps oddly, my politics are pretty squarely red-state, but there's no way I'd buy an American car. I like to imagine that both stem from the same underlying pattern (I'm a realist/cynic), but perhaps I'm flattering myself :-)
- dyeje 11y agoIt would have been nice to do the tables in markup instead of images. I wanted to Ctrl+F the cities I actually cared about.
- ComputerGuru 11y agoWhat poor writing! I've come to expect way better research and analysis pieces from startups about their domain (think articles like BackBlaze on drives, OKCupid on dating and socio-economics, Google on the web, etc) The'most unusually popular car by city' was rather poorly described and I think the results reveal that it was not a very proper query, as the 328i is hardly an 'unusual' car by any means (New York).. The article mentions the extreme loyalty of the Midwest to buying American but makes no mention of the fact that the biggest city in the Midwest (Chicago, obviously) has only 51% American ownership. No mention of age of vehicles, which is very odd.
- csours 11y agoWell these are kind of silly lists. I would like to see OEM ranks per city (VW Group, Toyota, GM, Ford, FCA, Nissan, etc), and vehicle classes per city (Half ton truck, small car, etc)
- codezero 11y agoAlthough interesting, this is heavily biased towards cars that need third party servicing, so probably doesn't include new cars that are within warranty.
- jordache 11y agoSubarus with V8 engines? What is yourmechanic.com? Ah yes the prerequisite tech blog (aka dubious article) in an attempt to sound like a data driven operation. What is their sample size?
- cpsempek 11y agoThe sample size? Probably large enough as it comes from Your Mechanic's "huge dataset". /s This is such a poor example of data analysis, even for a non-technical blog post. No mention of at least normalizing data, no mention of confidence or measures of uncertainty. Also, as others have mentioned, poorly written. If this was an attempt, as the comment above implies, to paint themselves at data driven, they failed. It impressed upon me the opposite, that they have no grasp of how to analyze and use data effectively.
- donretag 11y ago"American made" I am assuming the author meant headquartered in the US, because many foreign vehicles are actually made in US.
- itomato 11y agoThe Prius in San Francisco has more to do with ride sharing than some stereotypically 'hippy' motivation. That and HOV lane access. While one can make an argument that ride-sharing can be seen as a 'communal' effort to 'share wealth', the other is entirely selfish. In reality, they both are.
- cprayingmantis 11y agoWhile this data has some really neat aspects to it I think they miss some interesting observations, this is why I wish people would release their data set more often. How do they define unusually common? I ask this because there's an interesting pattern I think you can start to see emerge in the towns with lower populations. As you go down the list it looks like cheaper foreign cars are more "unusually popular". I doubt this is a function of where they're located or culture but I would guess it has more to do with median household income. It would be even more interesting to map where each car is serviced and see if you could determine where the most affluent communities are. Or maybe you could use property values coupled with vehicle values to see if financially responsible people tend to live in one community or another. You could then use this data to affect how you advertise in one area or another. Some areas you may want to market as "A quick affordable, mechanic right at your finger tips." and in others you may want to market it as "Having your own personal mechanic that caters to you." Just throwing that out there.