About Modelyear

Modelyear is a daily car guessing game. Five photos, one guess each: name the car and its model year.

How it works

Every day at midnight a new set of five cars goes up. The mix spans the whole history of the car: Model Ts and Beetles, fifties chrome, sixties and seventies muscle, eighties wedges, nineties Japanese sports cars, and the crossovers, pickups and EVs you pass on the highway today. They usually go from easiest to hardest.

For each photo, type a make or model and pick it from the list, then set the model year with the slider or the plus and minus buttons. Lock it in and the answer appears right away, along with the photo credit.

Scoring

Each car is worth up to 100 points: 50 for naming the model (15 if you only get the make), plus up to 50 for the year, minus 10 for every year you're off. A perfect day is 500.

Each car also gets a square. Green means the right model with the year within two. Yellow means the right model with the year further off. Orange means you got the make but not the model. Black means a miss. When you finish, the Share button copies a line like this, ready to text:

modelyear.io Oct 16, 2026
followed by your five colored squares.

Why model years?

Most car guessing stops at the badge. The model year is the harder, more interesting part: a facelift, a new grille or a different set of tail lights is often the only thing that separates one year from the next. The two-year window for a green square is there because many cars barely change inside a generation.

Where the photos come from

Every photo comes from Wikimedia Commons and is free to reuse under a Creative Commons license or the public domain. The years come from how each photographer labeled their picture, and every photo was checked to make sure it shows the whole car and matches its label. If you think an answer is wrong, the credit link after each guess goes to the original photo page.

Accounts

You don't need one to play: your results, streak and stats are saved in your browser, and there's an archive of every earlier day if you miss one. A free account (just an email address, no password: we email you a sign-in code) keeps your results on every device, puts you on the daily and weekly leaderboards, unlocks advanced stats like your accuracy by decade and by make, and unlocks extra color themes.

Who made it

Modelyear was built by Will Loughlin as part of 30 websites in 30 days.