I saw that, for the 12th year in a row, the Toyota Camry was the top-selling car in the U.S. It was quite interesting to see because here in Japan the Camry is much less popular, coming in something like 65th in the sales rankings. Here the top selling car is the Honda N-Box, seen at bottom left, a very square car of a popular style known as ワンボックス (“one box”) in Japanese. One trend that’s been prevalent in recent years is young people showing less interest in buying large, expensive cars, and manufacturers have had to get good at creating small car designs that are fun and stylish while still costing under $14,000 or so. These cars often have colorful names like the Nissan Note, the Honda Vamos, the Daihatsu Naked or the brand new Suzuki Hustler (seen at bottom right), which is causing a lot of smirking on the Internet for some reason. Incidentally, if you ever wondered what the word Camry meant, it comes from 冠 kanmuri, which is Japanese for “crown.” Toyota has a strange obsession with this word: they make a luxury car called Crown and have made cars named Corona (Spanish for crown) and Tiara in the past.
Popular cars in the U.S. vs. Japan are quite different.
