There Are 20 McLarens for Sale in America. There Are 71,161 Fords.

We hold 413,888 live used listings. Sorting them by badge gives a picture of what America actually resells — and the bottom of that list is much emptier than the top is full.

For every McLaren on sale there are 3,558 Fords. Ferrari, the most famous badge in the world, turns up 35 times in a market of four hundred thousand cars.

Thin markets price themselves badly

This is not trivia — it changes what a price guide is worth. A valuation is an average of comparable sales. With 71,161 Fords there is a comparable for everything: the same year, the same trim, the same mileage band, in the same state.

With 20 McLarens spread across a continent there is nothing to compare. Each car is priced by whatever its owner believes, and the average of $142,275 is the average of twenty opinions rather than a market rate.

We ran into the same wall when we looked at how few listings it takes before a price guide starts guessing. Below a few dozen comparable cars, the number on the screen is decoration.

13,082 sellers can't spell Chevrolet

The other thing that falls out of a badge count is spelling. These are not different manufacturers — they are the same ones, typed wrong, and each one is a separate entry in any system that reads the listing literally.

The counts higher up this page already fold these together — the 47,444 Chevrolets include every "chevy" and "chevorlet", because a badge count that splits one manufacturer across three spellings is measuring typing, not the market. 13,324 listings carry a badge that does not exist as written. Most of it is "chevy" — not really a mistake, just the name everybody actually uses — but the rest are genuine typos, and they behave the same way: a search for Volkswagen misses all 110 "volkswagon" cars.

Why this matters when you're the buyer

Misspelled listings are the closest thing to a free discount left on a classifieds site. They get fewer views because they are invisible to the obvious search, they sit longer, and sellers of stale listings negotiate.

If you are shopping for one specific model, run the search twice: once correctly, once the way a tired person types at eleven at night. Thirty-five "infinit" cars are not being seen by anyone searching Infiniti.

And when you're the seller

The mirror image, and it costs real money. A car listed under a misspelled badge is hidden from most buyers on the site. Spelling the manufacturer correctly in the title is the single cheapest thing a seller can do, and 13,324 listings currently do not.

Whatever the badge says, the VIN does not lie about it. A free VIN check returns the manufacturer as the factory recorded it — useful for checking that the car in front of you is what the advert claims, whether the seller could spell it or not.