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The most selfied cars on the Internet

Can we learn anything interesting about our relationship to cars from social media?

Jonathan M. Gitlin – | 59
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Even Sebastian, our UK editor, has been known to share photos of his BMW on Twitter.
Credit: Sebastian Anthony
Even Sebastian, our UK editor, has been known to share photos of his BMW on Twitter. Credit: Sebastian Anthony
Social media sometimes gets denigrated as just a way for narcissists to tell the world what they had for lunch, but analyzing what people post can also be a useful way to gauge public opinion. Auto insurance Center decided to take a look at several years-worth of data from the photo-sharing service Instagram to see if there were any interesting insights into how Americans relate to different cars (and whether that correlated with sales numbers for the first half of this year).

It looked at data from the beginning of 2011 until the middle of this year, specifically Instagram posts from within the US which were tagged with hashtagged car brands. According to its data, BMW leads the way by a healthy margin with more than 710,000 pictures over that timeframe, comfortably eclipsing runners-up Jeep (451,000) and Ferrari (388,000). Down at the other end of the scale, it seems that Instagrammers just aren't that enthused about Chryslers, Mercedes-Benzes, or GMCs, none of which broke the 50,000-post mark.

Car sales appear to have little effect on how often people snap pics of their rides though. As you might expect, low-volume exotics from Ferrari and Lamborghini appear online far more frequently than they leave showrooms—360 posts for every prancing horse sold in 2015 and more than 600 for each raging bull. Almost all the other brands they looked at struggled to beat two posts for every car sold, without any clear trend that correlated the two.

Others have also been trying to use social media as a barometer of public opinion in the automotive world. A company called Networked Insights has been tracking Twitter (and other platforms) to get an idea of how Volkswagen's ongoing diesel scandal has affected perceptions of the cars. In the week before we learned that the world's second-largest automaker had been fooling regulators and the rest of us about the cleanliness of its diesel engines, roughly 80 percent of VW-related tweets were positive, a number that soon nose-dived, plunging to just five percent by the time then-CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned.

Obviously these analyses of social media networks will give somewhat different results compared to traditional public opinion surveys, which are usually weighted to account for demographics in a way that's impossible here. But we're unlikely to stop sharing our thoughts online any time soon, and as long as that's the case we can expect others to pick through them as a form of digital tea leaves.

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Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor
Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.
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