Conventional wisdom

In our culture, cars are important. People like cars. In cars, tastes vary from people to people. People usually wants to have the best cars that they can afford. If everybody were rich we would all drive the same luxury cars.

What if

What if you chose your car according to your social status? What if the car
you are driving told people a lot more than you ever thought possible? What
if we could tell you according to profiling what cars mean?

Let us start by stating something simple. The car you drive represents your social status, your education level, your financial situation, your values in life, the way you want to be perceived and many other things. Do not forget that cars follow the general principle of clothes and hair fashions in the sense that your car follows your self-image. This is why cars are so revealing to profilers.

Here are some interesting facts:

• People with higher education tend to buy Japanese or German cars.
• People with lower education level tend to buy American cars.
• People with a steady income who work for the government or have high job security tend to buy Japanese cars.
• People who earn a living that is not steady (salesman, small business man,
  farmers …) tend to buy American cars.
• People feel very uncomfortable driving a car that they do not deserve. If for instance you earn 50,000 dollars a year you will not want to drive a Mercedes for fear of looking pretentious.
• Sports cars and pick-ups no matter the quality are mostly purchased by people
  who did not do well in school.
• European cars (Volvo for instance) are sold to people who have money but like to pretend that cars and materialistic things are of no importance to them.
• The first car you buy can be anything. Social profiling does play a role, prices does. It is socially acceptable for your first car to be anything.
• People with no profiling information have a very precise sense of car profiling. They will invariably point out with humor anybody who has a car outside their profiling.
• American car makers have been trying to crack the high education market for years by imitating the ‘Japanese look’ or foreign cars. To no avail, highly educated people are not buying a look they are buying a concept of stating their social level.
• People cannot buy a cheaper car, they tend to see the choice of a cheaper car as a social failure.
• People will use accessories on their car to state their social level (jacked up cars, stripes, mirror accessories, seat covers, etc)
• Car colours are also a statement of social status. Oddly enough car makers often neglect such a simple thing by painting very conservative cars with flashy colours for instance.
• The way people take care or their car also tells a lot about their personality and their values.
• Owners of American cars like to change their car as frequently as they can afford.
• For so-called European cars it is exactly the reverse, holding on to your car shows the fact that you are not superficial and are not attached to such vain things as money.
• Owners of Japanese car try to change their car according to what is sensible and reasonable, whatever that means.

What to make of it

The best thing you could do to understand car profiling is to watch the ads on T.V. to tell you what values are pushed. Observe the tone of the commercial. Observe the typical buyer that they show you. You will probably realize that pretty much like everybody else you are not buying a car according to your need but rather according to a social concept that you are barely aware of. As Jerry Seinfeld used to say: “not that there is anything wring with it!”