Saturday, December 29, 2012

Not so many small cars in small-town Minnesota and Wisconsin

Pontiac G3
We've been in Wisconsin (my wife's home state) and Minnesota (my home state) the last several days for the holidays, hence the lack of updates. It's always interesting to me to see what areas of the country have certain trends in cars.

Our current home, Portland, OR, is a bit of a microcosm of car culture (and other things ... have you seen Portlandia?). We have a lot of small cars, tons of hybrids, armies of Subarus, as well as a lot of big 4x4s. However, in the upper Midwest, specifically Minnesota and Wisconsin, there aren't nearly as many hybrids or subcompacts on the roads; at least in more rural areas. Then again, that's likely true in most rural areas. We did see a megaton of Pontiacs, even a couple of G3 models! We did see plenty of Subarus, 4x4s, and CUVs.

In 1,000 miles of driving southeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin, and parts of central Wisconsin, we saw zero Chevrolet Sparks or Sonics, three Toyota Yaris models, three Smart ForTwos, one Nissan Cube, a few Versas, and that's about all I can remember. We did see a number of Ford Fiestas. There are scads of Chevy Cruzes, Ford Focuses (Foci?), Honda Civics, etc. But not a many B-segments in general. Did I mention we saw about 7,725 Pontiacs? I swear: Pontiac must've sold more models in Minnesota and Wisconsin than anywhere else!


I'm really not surprised at the lack of small cars I've seen in while here. Maybe it's opened my eyes to how many small cars I see every day in the Portland area. I'm sure if I spent more time in larger cities, such as St. Paul, Minneapolis, Madison, or Milwaukee, we'd see more subcompacts. We, however, probably wouldn't have seen as many Pontiac G3s, though.

No comments: