Surprise: Edmunds analysis indicates correlation between gas prices and hybrid shopping
Edmunds.com is one of the go-to sites on the net when people are shopping for a car and they want to compare specs and prices without having to visit a dozen different car dealers. With all visits they get, Edmunds has a lot of data on what people are looking for and when. With all that data stored on their servers it was natural for them to do some analysis on it. They compared what vehicles were being shopped for and when against the price of gas at the same time.The results were shocking. You might be surprised to learn that when gas prices go up, people shop for more efficient cars. Actually the relationship is not quite that simple. With prices below $2.80 a gallon the relationship is fairly linear. Above that price point, things change much more aggressively. The consideration of vehicles like hybrids goes up dramatically while mid-sized SUVs plummets. This would seem to correlate well with the declining sales of vehicles like the Ford Explorer and Chevy Trailblazer. There's nothing here that anyone should find to terribly shocking, but it's interesting nonetheless.
[Source: AutoObserver, thanks to Srini for the tip]
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