split doesn't work because split is going to split your lines, while what you want has nothing to do with splitting - you want to extract substrings delimited by double quotes.

That's a task for Regexp::Common.

    use Regexp::Common;
    print "$3\n" while 'type="car" of make="Ford" color="red"' =~ 
                        /$RE{delimited}{-delim => '"'}{-keep}/g;
    __END__
    car
    Ford
    red
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Abigail