Consumers from smaller towns like Ludhiana, Coimbatore, Surat and Pune are driving online search for luxury cars in India with BMW and Mercedes-Benz emerging as the favourites at the top of the list, tech giant Google said today.

According to Google’s trends, conducted between January and August 25, German car makers BMW and Mercedes-Benz were the most searched luxury car brands in India, followed by Tata’s Jaguar and Audi.

“With growing section of rich Indians especially from the young generation being targeted by luxury car companies, Internet is playing small yet considerate role in decision making process,” Google said in a statement.

BMW, which led the search charts at the start of the year with searches peaking in its favour, was found losing its momentum as it witnessed the lowest search interest for brand BMW during the month of May.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz continued to attract large amount of searches during the year and finally surged ahead of its competition keeping a significant edge in search interest over the past couple of months, Google said.

“Smaller cities and towns are now very much part of the mainstream markets with most number of searches emerging from these places as leading luxury car makers fast-moving to these cities,” it added.

Thiruvananthapuram, Ludhiana, Vadodara, Ernakulum, and Surat contributed the highest number of searches for Mercedes—Benz, leaving behind metros cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Bangalore.

Ludhiana also led the search interest for BMW among smaller cities alongside cities like Coimbatore, Surat, Pune, Bhubaneswar, and Chandigarh.

Jaguar (now a Tata Motors owned company) attracted significant response online with most searches emerging from Coimbatore, Chinchwad, Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi and Noida.

Audi struggled to attract search interest from smaller cities with most searches emerging from metros including Bangalore, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Chennai and Mumbai, Google said.

According to reports, the Indian luxury car market had sales of more than 32,000 units in the calendar year 2013 and is expected to cross the 50,000 mark in 2014.

“With big brands looking to target emerging youth with launch of new models, their online presence and popularity is well going to be a key contributor to their larger success story,” Google said.

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