This Is the Most Popular Car in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 6, 11:30AM EST

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This Is the Most Popular Car in America — © shaunl / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

Toyota sold more cars in the United States last year than any other car company. GM had held first place for nine decades. Most likely, the Toyota victory was not based on demand alone. It did a better job of managing the tight supply of semiconductors used in vehicles. It may simply have had more cars and light trucks to sell to American consumers.

Some things do not change in the car industry. One of them is that, regardless of tight supply, the three full-sized pickups made by American manufacturers were the best-selling cars of 2021. This has been true for years. The Ford F-series pickup has been the top-selling vehicle in the United States for four decades.
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iSeeCars has just released data on the top-selling cars in the United States in 2021. It reviewed 17.4 million sales. The information did show that many models remain popular year after year. iSeeCars Executive Analyst Karl Brauer remarked:

While inventory constraints from the microchip shortage led to decreased sales volume for many popular vehicles compared to previous years, the most popular vehicles remained consistent when compared with 2021.

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The 10 best-selling new cars made up 20.4% of all new car sales last year.

Despite problems with auto parts supplies, the Ford F-150 represented 3.0% of new cars sales in 2021. It was followed by the Ram Pickup 1500 and the Chevy Silverado. Over a quarter of all Ford’s vehicle sales in the United States are F-series pickups.

Several small, fuel-efficient cars were in the top 10, good news for those who own them as gasoline prices spike. Perennial bestsellers the Honda Civic and Toyota Camry were on this list.

These are the 10 top-selling vehicles of 2021:

Ford F-150 (3.0%)
Ram Pickup 1500 (2.3%)
Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (2.2%)
Honda CR-V (2.2%)
Toyota RAV4 (1.9%)
Honda Civic (1.9%)
Toyota Camry (1.9%)
Toyota Tacoma (1.8%)
Toyota Highlander (1.6%)
Hyundai Tucson (1.6%)

Click here to see all the fastest-selling cars in America right now.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.