Survey Says: Americans Rank Muscle Cars Above Baseball as a National Symbol
Hagerty's 2,000-person survey found the road trip and the muscle car both out-scored baseball, apple pie, and rock 'n' roll on "iconically American."
A Hagerty-commissioned survey of 2,000 American adults, fielded in May 2026, found that more respondents rated muscle cars and "the road trip" as iconically American than rated baseball, apple pie, or rock 'n' roll the same way. The sample skewed slightly female (52%/48%) and was spread fairly evenly across generations, with an average respondent age of 46.
The driving-culture numbers underneath the headline finding are just as telling: 86% of respondents currently hold a driver's license, and roughly two-thirds of licensed respondents say they drive daily. Just over half say they can drive a manual transmission — and 10% of those who can't say they'd like to learn.
Surveys commissioned by a company with an obvious stake in car culture's popularity always deserve a little skepticism about the framing. But the underlying numbers on license-holding, daily driving, and manual-transmission literacy are concrete enough to stand on their own, independent of whatever headline Hagerty chose to put on top of them.
From the AE86 to the Devil Z: How Anime and Action Movies Built Car Culture's Mythology
Initial D made the Hachiroku a legend, Wangan Midnight turned the Shuto Expressway into a battleground, and a Vibe magazine article about NYC street racing eventually became a nine-film franchise. Fiction didn't just reflect car culture — it recruited half the people in it.
Windermere Reserve Wants to Sell Central Florida Collectors a Neighborhood Built Entirely Around Garages
Seventy climate-controlled "motor condos," a clubhouse, and a gate — the pitch is a residential community where every neighbor showed up for the same reason you did.
It's 7/7: Inside the Cult That Never Stopped Celebrating the Rotary
From Yokohama's Daikoku PA to a Queens tuner collective, July 7th has become the RX-7 and Wankel engine's unofficial holiday — rooted in a Le Mans win no other rotary has matched.