Throughout January, Toyota held it’s position as the most-searched car brand with new-car shoppers on the popular site Cars.com.  Though, the carmaker’s share of the search is dropping, and dropping quickly since the announcement of the recall for the sticky accelerator pedals, which occurred on January 22.

Before Toyota announced the recall, their share of searches for all new vehicle searches was 12%.  The brands that were the closest to Toyota were Chevrolet, which had 9.9% and Ford, coming in at 8.1%.  However, post recall, Toyota fell to 10.6% of all vehicle searches.  Chevrolet only fell slightly to 9.4%, however Ford saw an increase in searches to 8.7%.  Overall, new car searches were up 0.3%, probably because of end-of-the-month shopping.

During the same time period, search traffic for Scion and Lexus remained fairly flat.

Hyundai was the only brand that showed significant improvement above the overall average.  Its searches rose from 3.0% to 4.0% during the time after Toyota announced the recall.

No matter what car brand you are purchasing, make sure to protect yourself with new car warranties.  After all, you never know when you will need to make repairs.