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MT Cars Dataset
MT Cars is a famous statistical dataset. The data comes from the 1974 Motor Trend US magazine and contains fuel consumption and 10 aspects of automobile design and performance for 32 cars of the time.
Data Description and Links
This data is in an Excel spreadsheet in a public web location here. The spreadsheet has two tables
- MTCar - the characteristics of each model
- ModelCountryMap - has a row for each model and also the Area of Manufacture (Japan, Europe, USA) and the Cpuntry of Manufacture. This is useful for analysis by area and country e.g. are American cars the most efficient on average?
The data looks like this (not all rows shown).
The column (variable) names and explanations are listed here for convenience.
| model | Model Name |
|---|---|
| mpg | Miles/(US) gallon |
| cyl | Number of cylinders |
| disp | Displacement (cu.in.) |
| hp | Gross horsepower |
| drat | Rear axle ratio |
| wt | Weight (1000 lbs) |
| qsec | 1/4 mile time |
| vs | Engine (0 = V-shaped, 1 = straight) |
| am | Transmission (0 = automatic, 1 = manual) |
| gear | Number of forward gears |
| carb | Number of carburettors |
This is data from the US and the 1970s so is expressed on American Imperial units. The mpg is expressed in miles per US gallon and weight in pounds (lb). You may want to convert to more familiar units such as miles per litre. There are 3.785 litres in a US gallon. A pounds (lb) of weight is 0.454 kg.
Suggested Approach
Create a few visualisations to tease out some relationships between these variables – for example is there a relationship between weight and fuel efficiency (mpg) and does this depend on the transmission?