Transportation

How American Car-Buying Trends Define Us

Stock quotes in this article:F, GM, HMC, TM 

DETROIT (TheStreet) -- Our country is obsessed with cars, so it should not be surprising that often our cars define us.

In terms of identity, GM's(GM) Chevrolet is America itself, along with baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. And Ford(F), now headed by a rock star CEO, is newly chic.

The stereotypes have it that Californians love imports; moms and dads drive minivans; hippies drove VW vans and rednecks drive pickup trucks.

Also, what we drive can be closely aligned with how we vote -- but we'll get to that later.

A recent TrueCar review of 2010 retail vehicle buying in each of the 50 states provided an opportunity to comb through some intriguing statistics about our retail vehicle buying habits.

Among the conclusions: We truly do have a national vehicle. That is Ford's F-Series truck (above), which is the No. 1 selling vehicle in 35 of the 50 states.

We also discovered several other revealing trends. In some cases, these trends enabled us to characterize entire states. In other cases, they just made us wonder ... Read on.

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