New Zealand tops world table for supercar lovers
... Well, I use the term “officially” loosely here.
Supercartography, whose existence I admittedly only learned about a few hours ago while chomping through my Weetbix, have conducted a worldwide survey to calculate which countries “lust after supercars” the most. And New Zealand came out on top, ahead of Saudi Arabia (no shock) and Croatia (bit of shock there).
And they did this through, what else, Facebook.
Now before you pick up your laptop or smartphone and hurl it out the window in anger of yet another article based on a phony study, remind yourself just how many people have a Facebook account these days. It's a number in the ballpark of two billion, say Supercartography. According to their release their research was conducted through the Facebook Audience Insights tool (which is actually a pretty decent place to start for cold hard numbers), and compared the statistics connected to 10 different supercar manufacturers.
“We reviewed data for all supercar brands in our dataset and calculated the degree to which each country liked supercar brands more than the average worldwide,” they say.
“Similarly, to calculate the relative popularity of each brand we calculated the degree to which each country liked a specific supercar brand more than the average worldwide.
“To calculate both supercar brand head to head comparisons and the most popular supercar brand in each country we compared the raw audience numbers for each supercar brand in each country.”
Is this science? Maybe. In 2016 it probably is. What it does generate are some fascinating results — here's the top 10 in full:
1. New Zealand
2. Saudi Arabia
3. Croatia
4. Germany
5. Slovakia
6. Italy
7.Qatar
8. United Arab Emirates
9.Portugal
10. Belgium
Of course, it's not really a surprise that the ‘yeah, nah’, stubby wearing, buzzy bee worshiping nation of Aotearoa came up trumps. We as a country have long had a love affair with the automobile. Though I've never really associated that automobile to be a supercar — we seem to love V8s, hotted up WRXs, and BDA Escorts even more.
The 10 different manufacturers used to conduct the study were Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Aston Martin, McLaren, Pagani, Koenigsegg, Bugatti, Noble, and Maserati. If you visit the Supercartography site, you'll see that New Zealand ranks as one of McLaren's biggest concentration of fans. No shocks there. You'll probably also see through your snooping that the study is associated with an insurance company. No shocks there either.
What is a shock though is that New Zealand ranks as the biggest concentration of Pagani fans — a funky statistic when you consider that there's maybe one single Pagani in New Zealand (a beautiful red Huayra that recently landed). Another oddity is that Lamborghini are our 'most popular' brand with the most followers.
Interestingly Australia, the UK, and the US all struggle to rate, sitting 23rd, 27th, and 67th respectively. It's also interesting to see Thailand, 13th on the list, straddled betwixt Myanmar and Cambodia who both rate outside the top 60.
What a funny world we live in.