Cars have been a defining element of American life since the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1908.
According to the sales tracking company Autodata, Americans bought 16.5 million new cars in 2014. This fascination isn’t cheap: the average cost of a new car was $31,252 in 2013, according to TrueCar.com, and it’s rising fast.
And where there are car sales, there’re car loans. Experian Automotive found that 84 percent of new car sales were financed with loans in the fourth quarter of 2014. The rising cost of cars and the tendency to borrow to pay for them mean that auto debt in the US has risen $300 million in the past five years to almost $1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
To find out where people are buying cars in greatest numbers, and taking on debt to do so, we scoured Credit Karma’s own data for the cities with the highest percentage of Credit Karma members that have open auto loans.*
As it turns out, America’s southern states are the nation’s auto loan power center, providing 80 percent of the cities on the list. Texans in particular must love their trucks, as seven of the 15 cities are located in the Lone Star State.
Read on for a list of America’s most car mad cities.
- Killeen, TX, 53%
- Round Rock, TX, 52%
- Frisco, TX, 51%
- McKinney, TX, 51%
- Surprise, AZ, 50%
- Jacksonville, NC, 50%
- Midland, TX, 49%
- Clarksville, TN, 49%
- Gilbert, AZ, 49%
- Corpus Christi, TX, 49%
- Cedar Rapids, IA, 47%
- Abilene, TX, 47%
- Oklahoma City, OK, 47%
- Peoria, AZ, 47%
- Oceanside, CA, 46%
* Disclaimer: Includes all Credit Karma members who pulled their credit profile data from July 2014 through June 2015 and live in a city with a population greater than 100,000.