Badge on the tail, or road under the tires? That's the only question we score: why the car exists in its owner's life.
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Japan's golden-era heroes, scored on the same axis. Import mania has pushed several from tools toward trophies — the scores show exactly which.
The most honest category on the site — until allocation games reached the $35k shelf.
One car for everything. The wagons outscore their sedan twins — the ownership data explains why.
Where collector inflation meets homologation hardware. The value charts all hockey-stick; the mileage bars show what that cost.
The calibration anchors. If the index has a 10, it lives here.
Same 0–10 axis, but factor data is normed against other SUVs — track-day sightings mean something different here.
The axis survives the drivetrain: involvement is engineered or it isn't, and the ownership data doesn't care what powers the wheels.
Unreleased cars carry a provisional involvement read only — the Index score needs owners to exist, and activates after 24 months of ownership data.
Badge on the tail, or road under the tires? We only answer whether one or the other is the reason the car exists in its owner's life. That's the whole site — we rate the ownership reality of a model, not how good the car is. A brilliant car can score low, and no score here ever moves because a car got faster.
Every car page asks one question: where would you put it on the same axis? One vote per browser, and the community score is the median — robust against pile-ons. It appears as a hollow dot on the meter once a car has 10 votes, and it never moves the editorial Index score. When the two dots disagree, that disagreement is the content.
Track-day sightings appear on every car page as context but are not part of any score — the data is regional, noisy, and the easiest of our signals to game. We show it; we don't count it.
Badges are derived from the same data as the scores — they're conclusions, not decoration, and most cars carry none. A badge marks an outlier: Garage Queen (miles factor ≤ 2.5), Smiles per Dollar (score 8+, under $60k), Depreciation Hero (involvement 7+, down 45%+ vs new), Valet Royalty (score ≤ 1.8), Screamer (redline ≥ 8,800 rpm), Flip Bait (involvement 8.5+ but flip factor ≤ 4). Two are editorial lists: F1 DNA and Homologation Hero. Hover any badge for its rule.
Cars in the Coming soon section carry a provisional involvement rating only, read from prototypes and published specifications. There is no Index score, because there is no ownership to measure — it activates once a model has 24 months of market data. A brilliant press launch has never kept a car out of a climate-controlled garage.
Median asking price for a good-condition, average-mileage car in USD, from US-market sources (auction results and dealer listings), plotted from the model's first full year on the used market. Cars never sold in the US — R34, Evo VI, GR Yaris, Integrale, SLK 55 Black Series — are priced from the US import market. The card badge compares today's value against the original base MSRP. Values are illustrative in this mockup; a production version would pull nightly from auction APIs.
Where Doug DeMuro has reviewed a model, we show his DougScore (Weekend + Daily, out of 100) for reference. It measures how good a car is to own and drive — a complementary, different question from ours. Scores quoted from the public DougScore spreadsheet.
Reliability, running costs, build quality, investment potential. Other sites do that well. We only answer whether the badge on the tail or the road under the tires is the reason the car exists in its owner's life.