From Mini to Smart: The most googled cars in Britain

Digital and real-world popularity diverge when it comes to boning up on our favourite motoring models

Although only No 8 in the UK’s sales list, Mini is the most searched marque according to Google (Mini)

Although it doesn’t figure all that high in the best sellers chart, “Mini” looks like the most googled car in Britain. According to a survey sponsored by rimstyle.com, a website that markets car wheels and tyres, the brand is the most searched in the east of England, with strong results throughout the land.

“Mini” was, thus, the most frequent car query in Wolverhampton, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Leicester, Northampton and Basildon, among many others. As only the eighth best-selling car in Britain it seems to be more popular in the digital than the real world…

By comparison Ford, still the UK market leader, as it has been for about 40 years now, only “wins” the googling contest in relatively few places – Lincoln, Gloucester, Dover, Bognor Regis and Portsmouth. Perhaps Ford drivers are less inclined to go online, or know what they want in any case, or are simply less interested in their cars than prospective Mini owners.

City dwellers were keen to find out more about smaller cars (Smart)

Other preferences are more easily understood. In London the most googled make is Smart, along with Mini, though the preponderance of “Chelsea tractors” in the capital suggests that this survey, which has a relatively small sample size, doesn’t tell us everything about motoring tastes and habits. Still, like London, big cities generally do seem to display an interest in smaller vehicles, with Mini and Smart together being the most popular in Birmingham and Sheffield, as well as London and Manchester.

Perhaps more surprisingly, BMW is the most popular brand in the West Midlands, so far as the googling goes, which is odd considering the wave of hate that overtook the region when BMW decided to pull out of Rover – but that was almost two decades ago. BMW is now, in fact, still the global centre for smaller engine production and of course the Mini brand is flourishing in Oxford (where Mini was also the most googled badge).

The showing in the Midlands may simply be a function of BMW becoming one of the more mainstream brands, with a much wider range of cars and volume of sales than ever before.

Interestingly, and patriotically, Swindon favoured Honda, which coincidentally makes all of its Civic models for markets worldwide in the town. Stoke-on-Trent favoured Romanian brand Dacia; Seat is big in Stockport, Land Rover in Lancaster and Skoda in Mansfield, with Volvo ahead in Harrogate and Kia in Burton upon Trent. Citroen wins the googling contest across the northeast of England, and Skoda in Yorkshire and Humber.

Britain’s second biggest brand, Vauxhall, seems to excite comparatively little curiosity, at least as measured by this analysis of Google data. It does lead in Luton, the home of the Vauxhall vans operation and its corporate HQ, which may be as much to do with the sale of the marque to Peugeot earlier in the year. Elsewhere Vauxhall only comes first in Dudley. Peugeot, by the way, only topped the poll in one major population centre – Grimsby.