You Are What You Drive

March 23, 2011

It’s safe to say certain kinds of cars reveal a lot about a person, such as their income, interests, gender, and potentially much more.  So much so that there has even been a book published on psycho-analyzing drivers of particular vehicles.  While completely non scientific and outrageous, You Are What You Drive by Jay Lamm attempts to assess people’s personalities by the car they drive. Some of these outrageous sounding personality descriptions can be found here:

http://blogs.chron.com/carsandtrucks/2008/11/you_are_what_you_drive_1.html

In all seriousness, broad categories of vehicles such as SUV, pick ups, hybrids, gas guzzlers, foreign, US-made, luxury, etc., do cater to specific demographics.  Let’s take hybrids for example.  A study conducted by Mindset Media showed hybrid buyers to be:

  • Older than the average new car buyer by about 4 years (54)
  • More highly educated
  • Concerned with the environment
  • More politically liberal
  • Wealthier
  • More creative

More on this can be found at here.

These results are not surprising, and confirm that while “You Are What You Drive” is probably an overstatement, your vehicle can definitely convey a general description about who you are.

Orpix has developed technology that can automatically identify what kind of car an individual is driving, from images taken from either a fixed or mobile camera.  Linking this with the demographic data of particular vehicles, can provide rich information to advertisers trying to reach customers while in their vehicles, like pulling into a gas station, for instance.

For more on Orpix Make and Model Recognition, click here.

Or, contact us.

-The Orpix Team