By Johnathan Walsh
Still irresistible after all these years, the Volkswagen Beetle is the top car among women. Following closely are the Nissan Rogue and Hyundai Tucson compact SUVs and Volkswagen Eos convertible, according to a new survey.
Auto industry researcher TrueCar today released a demographic study that looked at more than 13 million vehicle registrations from the past two years. Beyond determining which cars women buy most often, it found "there is still a sizable gender gap when it comes to vehicle registrations," says Jesse Toprak, TrueCar's vice president of industry trends and insights. "Of the more than 200 models we examined, only nine were registered by more women than men and none of the brands had a registration rate that was higher for women," he says.
According to the study more men than women - at a rate of 64% to 36% - register vehicles in the U.S., even though females make up 51% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Surveys like these are tricky because you can slice the data several ways. The number of women buying cars differs from the number of women driving and registering them. The TrueCar survey looks at the gender of the name on the registration alone.
Here are the nine vehicles on TrueCar's list that were more popular among women than men, and the percentage of women registering them:
Volkswagen Beetle 56.1%
Nissan Rogue 53.5%
Hyundai Tucson 53.0%
Volkswagen Eos 53.0%
Volvo S40 51.9%
Honda CR-V 51.3%
Kia Sportage 50.5%
Toyota RAV-4 50.4%
Nissan Sentra 50.1%
Top 10 brands among women are Kia, Suzuki, Mini, Subaru, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, Volvo, Lexus and Mitsubishi. For these car makers the percentage of registrants to women ranges from 45.8% for Kia to 41.5% for Mitsubishi.