What car do National Assembly members own the most? Group the automobiles in the 2025 asset disclosures by model and rank them by the number of owning lawmakers, and the answer converges on one car: the Grandeur, 31 lawmakers. Yet split the same data by party color and a more telling picture emerges. About two-thirds of Grandeur owners belong to one party, while the premium Genesis line tilts the opposite way.
We ask not the priciest car but the most common one
Under the Public Service Ethics Act, lawmakers disclose their own and their family's assets every year. Those filings include an automobile entry, listing the model, declared value, and number of vehicles. Cars are small in scale next to real estate or deposits, but they reveal what other assets cannot: the most everyday and visible choice of all — what one drives.
The same car data tells a different story depending on the yardstick. Sort by declared value and one pricey import lifts the ranking, surfacing the ‘expensive garage’; sort by number of owners and what surfaces is ‘the choice the most lawmakers share.’ We chose the latter, because a model many lawmakers picked alike sits closer to a profession's common taste than one person's expensive car. As with the site's trend data, we counted the model names exactly as written in the filings. The 2025 automobile entries contain 197 distinct models; these are the seven owned by the most lawmakers.
The seven most-owned cars
The Grandeur, in first, is owned by 31lawmakers — five ahead of the G80 (26). No single car dominates; the leaders sit close together. What stands out is that both the No. 1 and No. 2 are full-size Hyundai-group cars. The Grandeur's declared value totals ₩490M and the G80's ₩740M — the G80 costs more, yet the Grandeur leads on ‘how many chose it.’ From third-place Carnival (17), a minivan breaks the run of sedans, and Genesis, GV70, Sonata, and Santa Fe pack the 14–16 band. Given the long tail — 130 of the 197 models are owned by just one lawmaker — these seven amount to a narrow ‘shared garage’ of the lawmaker class.
Re-reading the same ranking by party color
A grain invisible in the owner count alone appears the moment you add party color. Of the 31 Grandeur owners, 21 — about 68%— are from the Democratic Party (DP). The People Power Party (PPP) has 4, the Rebuilding Korea Party 3, the rest behind. The DP is the largest bloc, so more of its members file cars at all — its share of all car ownership is around 48%. Even so, the Grandeur's 68% runs well above that baseline. There is a ‘Grandeur tilt’ that seat counts alone do not explain.
The opposite direction is just as sharp in the data. Within the very same Genesis brand, the color shifts as you climb. The Genesis sedan (16) runs 9 PPP to 6 DP; the GV70 SUV (15) runs 8 PPP to 3 DP — far above the overall baseline (PPP 33%), tilting toward the PPP. Add up the whole Genesis line and it flips to 41 PPP against 35 DP. The ‘unassuming people's car, the Grandeur’ and the ‘premium Genesis’ split along party lines. Even in picking a single car, you catch the faint calculation of politicians conscious of the voter's gaze.
Spread across ten years — from Genesis to Grandeur
Widen the view to ten years and the top spot was no monopoly. In 2016 the most-owned car was not the Grandeur but the Genesis (48 lawmakers). Genesis led in 2016 and 2017, then again in 2021, 2022, and 2023, with the Grandeur filling the years between. The two traded the throne back and forth for a decade — the center of gravity moving, just as the title says, from Genesis to Grandeur.
The deeper shift happened inside the Genesis brand. The lone Genesis model fell from 48 owners in 2016 to 16 in 2025, a two-thirds collapse, while over the same span the G80 rose from 3 to 26. Lawmakers did not leave Genesis; they traded the older Genesis for the newer G80. In the end only the model name changed: for ten years lawmakers' taste in cars has merely circled inside the narrow box of the ‘domestic full-size car,’ never fundamentally moving.
What truly stands out is what's absent
Internal-combustion sedans and minivans fill the leaderboard. What truly draws the eye is what is not there. No pure electric vehicle is owned by more than two lawmakers. Add up every EV and hydrogen car — Ioniq 5, Nexo, EV6, Tesla Model 3 — and the total comes to about fourteen owners, less than half of the Grandeur's single tally of 31. Even in a period when the share of EVs on the streets was rising fast, lawmakers' garages were still filled with internal-combustion full-size sedans. The most conservative car consumption, it turns out, happens in the National Assembly parking lot.
Why a domestic full-size sedan, of all things? The answer is surprisingly simple. Legislative and constituency work involves frequent long-distance travel with passengers, making rear-seat space and ease of servicing important variables, while imported premium cars or pricey EVs carry the burden of reading as a ‘show of wealth.’ The Grandeur fills the same class without that burden. That a multi-seat minivan like the Carnival (17) sits in the chasing pack follows the same logic: it fits the route of touring a district with one's staff and the practicality of hauling gear for field events.
What a single garage tells us
In the end, what filled lawmakers' garages was less ‘what they like’ than ‘what fits the job and the gaze.’ This garage, which looks the most oblivious to trends, is in fact where the job's demands and political calculation overlap most candidly. The 31 who converge on the Grandeur, the party color that splits them in turn, the model distribution stuck in place for a decade — one small automobile entry mirrors both the shared instinct and the subtle differences of the lawmaker class.
Why look all the way down to the automobile entry in an asset disclosure? Disclosure is meant to be public, yet the records usually survive only as per-person tables, with the collective pattern invisible. Group by model, rank by owners, add party color, and the ‘tilt’ that individual filings hide comes into view. The Grandeur's 31 is not big money but the choice the most lawmakers share — and that this choice splits by party is exactly what a per-person table never tells you.
Method & source · Automobile entries from the government's public-official asset disclosures (official gazette), gathered by model name as written and tallied by the number of owning lawmakers, identical to the site's trend data. Spelling variants of the same model (e.g., Grandeur IG, HG) were counted separately, so merging a lineage can change the figures. Party color is the party distribution of each model's owners; the ‘overall baseline’ is each party's share of all car-ownership filings. An asset disclosure is a once-a-year snapshot, so it can differ from actual ownership if it falls out of sync with a vehicle change. The ranking points not to specific lawmakers but to the tallied vehicle types. Data tally · kookrator.