The Most Popular Cars in American Cities
yourmechanic.com
yourmechanic.com
"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.
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/
"The car is at the very center of many Americans [sic] lives. It can be a necessity, passion and a way to establish identity. As the number of car choices has increased, the car makeup of American cities have [sic] become vastly different. People in the Midwest are more likely to choose powerful American cars, while people on the coast are more likely to go for foreign, energy efficiency [sic] ones. Increased choice has unveiled the distinct character of American automotive desires."
It reads like a by-the-numbers high school essay. Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. Sprinkle in outright errors, failures of parallelism, passive voice, and wordiness (...are more likely to...are more likely to...).
The rote approach combined with the anodyne results put this reader to sleep.
You can have a six cylinder with more power than a V8. And that was before a few big technologies went mainstream: Turbocharging and direct injection.
Now you have Ford shipping a V6 as their main truck engine in their F150 because it is turbocharged and direct injected. Both of these technologies allow smaller engines to produce more horsepower and torque without the need for additional displacement and cylinders.
Ford's V6 with these two technologies is not only more powerful than a lot of current-generation V8s, but it is way more powerful than a lot of V8s used to be.
Even before these fancy new technologies, I used to drive an Acura with 200+ hp from a 2.0 liter 4 cylinder engine.
The amount of cylinders is pretty good short-hand for how much gas an engine will roughly use, but it's a less useful guide to how powerful an engine is anymore.
And with more and more cars gaining electric motors to augment gas engines, things are changing even more.
Two counterpoints though:
1. I posit (without evidence, because I'm lazy) that most people who buy "fast" new cars are more concerned about image than the actual performance specifications. For example, I suspect that the vast majority of original owners of Corvettes never take their cars to the racetrack. And in terms of image, number of cylinders and liters of engine displacement are much higher priority than dyno readouts.
2. More combustion chambers in an engine = higher power, higher manufacturing cost, and lower fuel economy. If you have less than $2000 to spend on a car, and you spend it on a 1980's V8, it's probably going to be slower than a three-cylinder 1.0L 2016 Ford Focus. But it's still probably the fastest option in your price range, so it's a good representation of how much you value performance in the car you choose to buy.
> V8 engines are more powerful than the four and six cylinder engines found in more than two thirds of the cars we service
This is also poorly written and not even necessarily correct. Modern V6 engines and Turbo 4s can be more powerful than older V8s.
Re-write:
About 14% of vehicles we service are powered by V8 engines with two banks of four cylinders in a V arrangement.
(I, for one, appreciated the extra clarification. If the article had just said, "14% of cars we service have a V8" it would have been accessible to a far narrower audience.)
I know more than a smidgen about cars, but I appreciated the explanation. Presumably, OP believes that I must not know a true smidgen about cars.
Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics.
"The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names"
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.
So I bought a Subaru Outback.
Cities are by definition not rural, but Oklahoma City is much closer to the rural lifestyle than, say, SF or NYC.
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.
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.
The intersection set of (mfr. w/ quality reputation) && (mfr of 4-seat convertibles) has been getting smaller and smaller, at least in the US.
On the bright side, Wranglers tend to be bought by owners who know what they are in for, and intend to keep their vehicle, hence their anomalously (for a relatively low-priced domestic vehicle) excellent resale value. They're not being made for the two-year lease crowd, which IMO has led to so much derangement in the execution of many new cars.
My wallet laughs at this assertion! Chrysler plays the upgrades game very well in the Jeep line (and I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker).
Sure, you can buy a base Wrangler X for around $20k. But, it's really easy to option them up to BMW territory. My only defense is at least spending the money on factory upgrades gets me a factory warranty, unlike similar upgrades sourced from Quadratec.
I'm surprised Colorado beat out Seattle, but then the latter doesn't really have snow unless you go east or skiing.
I am assuming the author meant headquartered in the US, because many foreign vehicles are actually made in US.
What is their sample size?
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.
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.
Springfield - Mass?
Bridgeport - CT?
(OK most people assume Oregon, but I'm from Portland Maine and this always makes me irrationally bitter).
tl;dr: there are a lot of Springfields.
Everywhere else in BC mainland, Pickup (F-150/Ram)
that'd be my guess for BC.
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.