Autoknowtive
How to identify a car
Most cars give themselves away long before you can read a badge. Here’s where to look, roughly in the order that pays off fastest, and how to go from “some kind of BMW” to the right generation and year.
1. Find the maker first
The make narrows thousands of possibilities to a few dozen, so it’s worth getting right before anything else. A badge settles it when you can see one, but photos are often cropped or taken from an angle, so learn the shapes around the badge too.
Be careful with shared cars. Some models are built by one company and sold under two names with small changes to the nose and badges: the Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ are one example, and the Fiat 124 Spider of the late 2010s was built alongside the Mazda MX-5. When two answers look almost identical, the grille and the badge are usually the only difference.
2. Read the grille
Grilles are a brand’s signature, and many have kept the same basic shape for decades while everything else changed.
- BMW: a pair of “kidney” grilles side by side. Older ones are small and upright; recent ones have grown much larger.
- Audi: since the mid-2000s, one large trapezoidal grille that runs down into the bumper, often with the four rings at the top.
- Alfa Romeo: a narrow triangular shield in the middle of the nose, with the number plate pushed off to one side on many models.
- Jeep: seven vertical slots, most obvious on the Jeep Wrangler.
- Lexus: since the early 2010s, the “spindle” grille, shaped like an hourglass.
- Rolls-Royce and Bugatti: a tall upright temple-style grille for Rolls-Royce, a horseshoe for Bugatti.
Electric cars break this rule, because they need far less cooling air. Many have a smooth panel where the grille would be, so on an EV look harder at the lights.
3. Look at the lights
Since LEDs became common in the 2010s, designers have used daytime running lights as a second logo. Volvo’s T-shaped “Thor’s hammer” lights, introduced on the Volvo XC90 of the mid-2010s, are a famous example, and recent Porsches use four small LED points inside each headlight. At the back, a full-width light bar running across the tailgate became a trend in the 2020s, which also helps date a car.
Lights are also where facelifts show up first (more on that below), so they help with the year as well as the make.
4. Check the proportions
Where the engine sits and which wheels it drives shape the whole car, and that shows even in a silhouette.
- Front engine, rear-wheel drive (most BMWs, the Ford Mustang, big Mercedes saloons): a long bonnet and a long gap between the front wheel and the door, sometimes called the dash-to-axle ratio.
- Front-wheel drive (most family hatchbacks such as the Volkswagen Golf): a shorter bonnet, the front wheel close to the door, and more body hanging out ahead of the front wheels.
- Mid-engine supercars: the cabin sits well forward, with a long rear deck behind the seats.
- Rear engine: the Porsche 911’s roof slopes all the way to its rear bumper, a shape it has kept since the 1960s.
Small details repeat too. BMW has put a forward kink in the bottom of the rearmost side window, the “Hofmeister kink”, on most of its cars for decades.
5. Date it: generations and facelifts
Once you have the model, the year is about working out which generation you’re looking at, then whether it’s an early or late car within it.
A generation is a full redesign, usually every five to eight years. The doors, roof, windows and overall shape all change. If the side windows and door shapes match, you’re in the right generation.
A facelift (or mid-cycle refresh) comes partway through a generation. It replaces the parts that are cheap to change: bumpers, headlights, tail lights, grille and wheels. The doors and glass stay the same. So the side profile tells you the generation, and the front and back tell you whether it’s before or after the facelift.
Every model page in our car guide shows all the model years we have side by side, which is the quickest way to train your eye on this.
6. Era clues that work on any car
- Bumpers: thin chrome bumpers are a sign of the 1960s and early 1970s. From the mid-1970s, US-market cars carried big impact-absorbing bumpers to meet new crash rules. From the 1980s bumpers were increasingly painted to match the body.
- Headlights: round sealed-beam lamps dominate before the mid-1970s, then rectangular ones in the US. Flush, aerodynamic headlights spread in the mid-1980s. Pop-up headlights were popular on sports cars from the 1970s through the 1990s and had all but vanished by the mid-2000s.
- The third brake light: a high-mounted centre brake light became required on new cars in the US from the 1986 model year, so its absence on a US car points to something older.
- Wheels and tyres: wheels have steadily grown. Fourteen-inch wheels were normal on family cars in the 1980s; twenty-inch wheels are common on SUVs today.
- LED signatures: shaped LED daytime running lights point to around 2010 or later.
7. Model year isn’t the year it was built
Carmakers, especially in North America, often start selling the next model year in the autumn. A car built in late 2019 can be a 2020 model. Autoknowtive uses the model year, and in the Daily a guess within two years of the answer counts as close enough to win.
Practise
The fastest way to get good is to see a lot of cars. In Quick Play, Spot It starts with a blurred close-up, Cockpit shows only the dashboard, and Model Year asks you to date a photo exactly. The Daily gives everyone the same car each day, with six guesses. When you miss one, look it up in the car guide and compare it with the model years around it.