Motoring is changing. Electric cars are set to rule the roads. Motorists buy practical, which means very big or very small cars. Yet, one vehicle class still turns all the eyes on the road: the supercar.
Fast. Muscular. Luxurious. Borderline-legal. The curved line of the supercar began in the original James Bond era and still flows through the streets (and bendy mountain passes) today. And with Tesla’s Roadster due for a delayed launch in 2022, the worlds of the classic supercar and futuristic electric vehicle are about to converge.
So, what is the state of the supercar today? Chasing Cars analysed thousands of Instagram posts to see which brands we’re driving in which countries and cities. We balanced the number of supercar brand hashtags against the number of motorists in each place to find whose roads boast the highest density of supercar drivers.
Spoiler alert: if a vehicle passes you in Monaco, it’s probably a supercar.
Key findings
- Monaco is the country with the highest rate of posts with supercar hashtags per 1,000 motorists: 3,048.
- There are 3 supercar photos per motorist in Monaco, a rate that is 19 times that of second-placed Denmark.
- Miami is the most supercar-obsessed city, with 1,514 Instagram posts per 1,000 motorists.
- The most popular supercar on Instagram is the Ford GT, with 600,167 tags.
Supercar cities
This interactive shows the cities that are giving supercars the most Insta-love. Click the tabs to switch between the grand total and each supercar brand.
Miami looks nice. The city has the world’s biggest collection of art deco buildings which bask against a backdrop of idyllic beaches. And Miami is known as a refuge for the wealthy. So, it’s no surprise that there are 50% more supercar Instagram posts than there are drivers in Miami (1,514 per 1,000 registered vehicles). Miami also tops the brand-specific city charts for Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Aston Martin posts.
They say it’s grim up north, but the UK’s northerners relieve the gloom with flashy motors. Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow are not known as wealthy cities, but are frequent players in our top tens. In fact, the five biggest Bugatti-loving cities are all in the UK, with Leeds and Manchester posting about the French-Italian brand 10 times per 100 registered cars in each city.
The 10 supercar brands that get the most Insta-love
Here are the supercar models that get hashtagged the most on Instagram. Pole position goes to the Ford GT. The ‘teardrop’-shaped Ford supercar cruises along on a 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged V6 engine with 660-horsepower. Your basic GT comes in at around US$500k but if you’re going to post it on Instagram you’ll want to shell out an extra $250k for the Batmobile Liquid Carbon edition.
McLaren puts in a team effort in our top ten, with four models sharing the spoils: the P1, 720S, F1, and Senna. The Senna is a particularly super supercar, with the most powerful McLaren engine that you will hear on the street. It is also McLaren’s lightest road car since the F1, giving an incredible power-to-weight ratio of 668PS-per-tonne (659bhp). Super!
Supercars are one of those things (like fried breakfasts) that just look great on Instagram. At the pinnacle of road vehicle design, and created to look stunning, the supercar is an unashamed crowd-stopper. The trick is finding one that’s going slowly enough to snap it.
As the motor industry surges into a more environmentally-aware age, who knows what the engineers at Koenigsegg, Mercedes-Benz, and McLaren will conjure next?
Methodology and sources
In order to find the 10 of the most popular supercar manufacturers, we took a sample of 5,000 Instagram posts under each corresponding hashtag (e.g. #ferrari for Ferrari) that had the location disclosed. Then we took a sample of the geotagged posts for each hashtag and extrapolated to estimate location counts across all posts with hashtags.
We used the World Health Organisation to find out the number of cars registered in each country and city, then we estimated the number of supercar-tagged posts there were per 1,000 registered vehicles in each country. For the selected cities, the number of vehicles registered was derived by taking the country’s ratio of registered vehicles per capita and multiplying it by the population of the city.
Data collected in February 2021.
