Badge on the tail, or road under the tires? We score the question spec sheets can't answer — why a car exists in its owner's life. 0 for the trophies, 10 for the tools.
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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.
No performance pretense required — these are pure status purchases, kept on the index because the axis needs its floor.
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), Daily Driven (miles factor 8.5+), Track Rat (track-day sightings 8+ — the one badge drawn from the context signal we refuse to score), Bargain Window (involvement 7+ at its all-time price low — a description of the market, not investment advice), Endangered Stick (manual, still in production, involvement 8.5+). Three are editorial lists: F1 DNA, Homologation Hero and Forbidden Fruit (never sold new in the USA). Hover any badge for its rule.
Two extra readings appear on car pages and in Compare, and neither touches the Index score. Power-to-weight (hp per tonne, series-production trim) is banded for real-world use rather than bragging rights: under 90 hp/t is a momentum car, 90–260 is the sweet spot you can actually exploit on a mountain road or a novice track day, 260–400 demands real commitment, and above 400 is expert territory. Anything over 2.2 tonnes is banded heavyweight regardless of the ratio — at that point mass, not power, is the story. Handling (0–10) is an editorial read of steering quality, chassis balance, limit friendliness and real-road footprint from period road tests — approachability, not lap pace, which is why a Caterham outscores hypercars. The Index still only answers why the car exists in its owner's life; these exist so you can see when the machine and the ownership pattern disagree.
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. With the units toggle set to metric, prices display in euros at a fixed ≈ 0.92 USD→EUR rate; the underlying data stays US-market USD. 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.