Oregon Public Broadcasting

A car buyers website picked Eugene Friday as the city with the biggest local interest in green cars. As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, Portland came in second and Medford seventh in the national ranking.

Cars.com looked at 210 cities across the nation and compared how many searches there were for hybrid cars per capita.

Website editor, Kelsey Mays, says interest varied widely from region to region and he’s not surprised companies like Nissan and Mitsubishi plan to market their electric cars in Oregon.

Kelsey Mays: “The car companies definitely want to find those advanced sort of trend-setting people who are definitely on the cusp of green thinking if you will. And so it would make sense that they would come out to areas like California and Oregon.”

West coast states came in highest on the list followed by states like Hawaii, Montana and Colorado. Then came Midwest states and the East Coast with Southern states at the bottom.