The go-to answers will likely be Toyota and Subaru, but I have a different take:
It’s Jeep.
Pull up a chair and stay a while while I explain. While Subaru has led with Marketing genius backed up with true functional capability, and Toyota is the GOAT when it comes to packing reliability, resale, and inoffensiveness into the psyche of the collective masses, Jeep has a different reason for being important to the non-car people.
Because Jeep makes the Wrangler, and despite constant warnings of the automotive press (It rides terrible! It steers terrible! Oh it’s so uncomfortable! Oh they’re so expensive!) ——Yes, Automotive press, the Wrangler absolutely sucks compared to just about anything.
Yet people buy them anyway. And not just the hardcore off-roaders and Mall-crawling dudebros.
Normal people buy them, and they love them! Why? Why would normal non-car people love something declared so inferior by the almighty internet?
Because Jeep Wranglers, more than any other car model out there, turn non-car people into people that are into thier cars.
By combining the off-roady looks, the customizability, the convertible factor, the actual all season capability, and the constantly growing Jeep “Community” you have a recipe for something a lot of people want to be a part of!
It’s a community of “normies” so large now that there are Facebook groups tens of thousands strong full of regular ass people that were never into cars, but they have ducks on thier dash, names on the side, and color matched outfits to thier vehicles when they GO OUT TO MEETS! These are mostly people that were never into cars, or working on them, or meeting other people at places just to show off their cars.
But because of a shared love of an infinitely customizable convertible rolling anachronism, they’re decorating their cars in christmas lights and attending parades, they’re out doing Jeep drives for charities, they’re migrating every year to Miami, Myrtle, Or Gatlinburg for huge meetups. And it’s not just one “Group” or “Type” of person. You go to a drift meet, you have a pretty good idea of what culture of people are going to predominantly there. Same thing with, say, the Hot Rodders, the Supercar guys, the Lifted Truck scene.
But the Jeep community? You have EVERYONE. Black, white, Rich, Poor, Urban, Rural, Religious Evangelists, Swingers, Environmentalists and Rednecks, you truly can run into ANYONE at a Jeep meet or in a Jeep Group, all united by one thing: Absolutely loving a certain car.
Jeep, seemingly hated the most by actual car-people, has ironically brought car-enthusiasm to the non-car people.