Ford Motor Company (F), Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. (ADR) (NSANY): These Cars Are Big With Subprime Buyers

The Kia Forte may be a favorite of buyers with sub-prime credit. Photo credit: Kia

Is your credit rating damaged? Do you need a new car?

You might want to consider buying a car from Chrysler or Kia, like the Kia Forte pictured above.

Chrysler and Kia are the automakers with the biggest presence on a new list of top 10 new vehicles bought by subprime borrowers who worked through CarFinance.com, a site that helps subprime buyers find financing.

CarFinance.com’s data set isn’t big enough for us to draw too many conclusions about what actually might be going on here. But I found it interesting, because the automakers on the list have seen big growth since the economic crisis.

And for a couple of those automakers, there’s some evidence that subprime lending might have a lot to do with that growth.

10 cars popular with subprime buyers
Here are the vehicles on CarFinance.com’s Top 10 list, in order:

This list probably reflects a limited data set, but it has a lot of overlap with one released by auto-data site Edmunds.com last year. That list showed the top 10 new cars with the highest percentage of purchasers paying more than 10% interest on their loans, which Edmunds considers an indicator of subprime status. The Avenger, Forte, Sentra, 200, Journey, and Versa were all on that list as well.

Not surprisingly, almost all of the vehicles on the list are value-priced choices. Chrysler markets the Dodge Avenger as America’s “most affordable midsized car,” and the Korean-made Kias are positioned as stylish but inexpensive alternatives to the mainstream Japanese brands.

The exception is the Focus, which Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) has positioned as a somewhat premium product. But its position on this list might just reflect its general popularity — Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) said recently that the Focus was the world’s best-selling car in 2012.