Motor Mouth: No, Canadians aren’t buying Porsches instead of Civics

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Officially, AutoTrader.ca’s latest research missive is entitled “ Despite global supply shortages, Canadians remain steadfast in their vehicle preferences .” Less officially — actually, completely unofficially — perhaps it should have been called “Sometimes data, no matter how well-researched, is a reminder how large a gulf there is between what people want and what they actually buy.” As we say in the biz: Money talks, bullshit walks.

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So, for instance, in Quebec, the number one car searched on AutoTrader’s vast website this past year was — the 911, Porsche’s supercar, displacing perennial favourite Honda Civic, which topped the list for the last four years running. Just for giggles, I looked up the actual sales figures for both cars and, no surprise here, the cheap(ish) Civic, though much diminished from its heyday thanks to our preoccupation with sport-cutes, still outsells the pricey Porsche by more than 30 to one.

Now, Canadians are indeed spending more on their cars. According to AutoTrader’s data, nearly half of car buyers (48 per cent) says the pandemic saved them money — either because they could not travel or as a result of the government’s CERB handouts — but I think we can all agree that even Liberal largesse isn’t going to make the Porsche Canada’s most popular car.

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Nor is it only La Belle Province ’s giddiness with all those inflationary dollars that’s skewed customers’ intentions. Notably less pricey — but no less impractical — is Ontarians ranking Ford’s Mustang as the car they want the most information on. And that’s not even the hot-selling — so much so that Dearborn is hoping to triple production to 200,000 by 2023 — Mach-E electric. Nope, according to the “Canadians remain steadfast in their vehicle preferences research,” it’s the pony car they’re supposedly shopping. Looking through car sales site GoodCarBadCar , I see that a whopping 1,120 two-door fastbacks have been sold so far this year, down some 36 per cent compared with a pandemic’ed 2020.

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Indeed, other than the merciful inclusion of Ford’s F-150 at the top of the list, AutoTrader’s top five “most searched” cars in Canada reads like a who’s who of has-beens and never-weres of top purchases. The Mustang and the 911 ring in at second and fourth respectively; the third spot, BMW’s 3 Series, may remain sorta, kinda popular, but Munich’s sedans are definitely living in the shadow of the brand’s SAVs these days.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz’s C-Class, which just edged into the fifth spot, is actually doing so badly with consumers that our own Timothy Cain says it’s “not even among Canada’s 25 premium leaders” in his latest Driving by Numbers, “ 10 vehicles that didn’t rebound in the 2021 Canadian auto industry. ” In fact, you have to scroll all the way down to seventh place before you get to Toyota’s RAV4, Canada’s most popular non-pickup and the first SUV on the list! It’s followed by Mercedes’ E-Class, Chevy’s Corvette, and various BMW M cars, huge sellers all.

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Still more AutoTrader data confuses. Under the headline “Canadians plan to go big with their next vehicle,” the company’s research say that 30 per cent of its shoppers intend to “upsize to a larger vehicle than their current car.” I’ll remind you all that, other than the F-150, none of the vehicles in the company’s top 10 searched vehicles would be considered very big. Even the RAV4 is considered pretty picayune by SUV standards.

It wasn’t all blarney and bluster, though. According to its survey, AutoTrader says four in five of its customers were aware of the global shortage of superchips and how it was driving auto prices higher. More importantly — for AutoTrader, since most of its listings are pre-owned — 27 per cent were willing to switch their intended purchase from new to used in light of scarcity and pricing. But we knew all that; if not the actual numbers, then at least the general gist of where the marketplace is heading. Indeed, the only surprise is AutoTrader’s claim that almost a third (31 per cent) of Canadians shopping for a new – or new-to-them – car would be willing to travel over 400 kilometres if it meant getting a better price. Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures.

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AutoTrader’s ‘study’ seems like a bunch of stuff we knew already — cars are scarce, Canadians are still buying

On the other hand, it’s hardly news that the unpredicted demand for automobiles is the result of our newfound antipathy for public transport. AutoTrader says that 45 per cent of its shoppers want to use public transit less often; the desire for cabs is down an equal number; and ride-sharing is similarly on the down and out. Hell, you know things are bad when 40 per cent of Canadians claim they’d prefer to walk than get into a vehicle with someone else.

Even if that number is simply intent rather than actual fact — 40 per cent of Canadians actually walking as a mode of transportation sounds about as fanciful as Porsche being the number one car shopped in Quebec — it’s still a glaring indicator of how much mobility has changed in these last 18 months, and how difficult it will be for public transportation to rejuvenate its pre-pandemic momentum. Perhaps most incredibly of all, a whopping 63 per cent of those who claimed they saved more money as a result of COVID-19 travel bans said they were going to put those increased savings towards purchasing a vehicle, echoing how precipitously our trust in public transit has fallen.

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Futurists once claiming that the era of private car ownership was a fading exemplar of Boomer consumerism have been remarkably silent these past 18 months. Even the company’s claim that two-thirds of non-owners are open to buying an EV for their next vehicle — echoing those same futurists’ predictions — smacks of focus-group-itis, the number of Canadians actually buying battery-powered vehicles still below the five per cent mark overall.

Indeed, AutoTrader’s “study” seems like nothing more than a bunch of stuff we knew already — cars are scarce, Canadians are still buying — melded to a bunch of statistics that point to bored-at-home shoppers Googling their dream cars out of isolation-mandated ennui.

If you really are looking for hard, just-the-facts-Jack information about Canadians and their cars, may I suggest you read our own Timothy Cain and his Driving by Numbers column. Every one is full of up-to-the-minute data and analysis detailing which cars we are actually buying and why. It’s a lot more insightful than the fantasy and conjecture I just read.