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Team player or loner? Aggressive or patient? Cost-conscious or showy? All these characteristics, it appears, come into play when it comes to buying a car, says the Swiss news and features magazine Facts, basing its opinion on recent studies.

People who drive a Peugeot, tend to be buy on finance, Saab drivers tend to be better educated. The make of car you drive gives astounding insights into the personality of the buyer, says Facts. Researchers, it appears, are taking an increasing interest in such relationships.

VW: the safe choice

"The car brand you choose is like a second personality", explains the business psychologist, Rüdiger Hossiep, who is heading up the Ruhr University study. People choose the model that best corresponds to their own personality features, thus sending out a message of how they see themselves and how they would like others to perceive them.

Conscientious and harmony-seeking people, for example, are unlikely to choose anything extravagant. Nothing from the Far East, either, that might cause colleagues to turn up their nose. So they buy a car with majority appeal, namely a Volkswagen. "With a VW, you don't stand out and can move around concealed amid a mass of similarly-minded people", says Hossiep.

Colleagueship, too, can be determined by way of what car brand a person selects, he continues. People who are team-oriented tend to drive a Ford, Toyota or Citroën. Drivers of Opel, Fiat and Renault, on the orher hand, are more individually-minded, while buyers of prestige marques such as Audi, BMW and Mercedes are comparative loners, a character trait which expresses itself through their aggressive highway driving, according to the German drivers' club, ADAC.

This attitude works to protect them, says Rüdiger Hossiep, in that should they not speed away the moment the traffic light turns green, they are less likely to get "honked" by the car behind than the driver of the Nissan Micra next to them.

There's a positive side to this nature, too, he continues. Impatient they may be, but drivers of top-of-the-range German cars also tend to be more flexible than other people, able to cope with a heavy workload and motivated to lead and perform. That'll be your company boss then. And if they upgrade, they're likely to opt for the typical choice of the older man with money in his pocket, the Porsche 911. According to the research, buyers of this speedster have one of the highest averages ages of any group included in the study. Something to think about, on the other hand, is that very few senior managers choose Swedish technology, even though drivers with the highest level of education are most likely to be found behind the wheel of a Saab, says Hossiep.

The relationship a person has with money has a more subtle effect on brand choice than one might at first think, he continues. Somebody looking to spend 35,000 Swiss francs, for example, has an enormous range of models available to him, all more or less technically the same. What is decisive, in such cases, is the image. According to the Lloyds TSB study, buyers of middle-of-the-range brands are among the most wealthy, with twice as much money in their bank account as the average. Peugeot drivers are particularly thrifty, Lloyds TSB found, which cannot be put down to particularly-French virtues. Renault drivers, on the other hand, are often out of money and resort to car finance to purchase their cars more often than other types of buyer. Models from Toyota, too, the second-largest car maker in the world, are often (18%) bought on credit. Citroën buyers are at the other end of the scale, with just 5% of buyers using this form of borrowing, while Ford drivers are the least likely to go into debt and regularly check that their account to see that their money is working for them.