Coruscation

The first challenge was figuring out who exactly is "rich." The Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent the bottom 99 percent of the population. The remaining 1 percent, according to the Internal Revenue Service, earn $506,000 or more. President Obama, meanwhile, has set the dividing line at $250,000. Under $250,000, you're middle class; anything over $250,000 and you're wealthy so you should pay higher taxes. Only 2 percent of households in the nation make more than $250,000, according to the IRS, so that seemed like a decent cutoff.

I then asked researchers at Experian Automotive, a unit of the well-known credit information service, to dig into their database of more than 600 million vehicles in the United States and Canada for insights.

Experian looked to see which brands were favored by people in three different income groups: $250,000 or above; $100,000 to $249,000, and less than $100,000. Not surprisingly, the richest people were the most likely to buy luxury brands (39 percent for people with household income above $250,000 vs. 8 percent for people who earn less than $100,000 a year).

But what that analysis also told me was that 61 percent of people who earn $250,000 or more aren't buying luxury brands at all. They're buying the same Toyotas, Hondas and Fords as the rest of us. So what cars are preferred by the rich?

Luxury models led the list of the 10 most popular cars for people earning over $250,000: The Mercedes E-class, Lexus RX 350, BMW 5 Series and 3 Series had the top four spots. But most surprising is the cars that rounded out the top 10: Three Hondas, a Toyota, an Acura and a Volkswagen. Not a single domestic vehicle in the bunch, though Cadillac has at least grown in popularity among the rich for the past two years.