Car Brands Trivia
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90 free Car Brands trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every badge on the road hides a story: a watchmaker, a plumber, a sewing-machine shop or a wartime aircraft works that ended up building cars. Names were borrowed from chiefs, gods, rivers and winds, and ownership has changed hands so often that the country on the badge is rarely the country that signs the cheques. This quiz covers more than 40 marques from Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia: founders and founding years, home cities, parent groups, what the logos mean, where the names came from, and the brands that were killed off or brought back from the dead. It suits pub-quiz hosts, petrolheads and anyone who has ever argued about who really owns whom. Every answer is cited to its source.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which carmaker's name blazed in lights on the Eiffel Tower from 1925 to 1934?
Citroën
Citroën lit the tower with 250,000 bulbs, yet in late 1934 the firm went bankrupt and fell into the hands of Michelin, one of its biggest creditors.
Q 02The circle-and-arrow badge on Volvo cars is the ancient alchemical symbol for which metal?
Iron
Iron's alchemical sign became the badge, while the Volvo name had first been registered by bearing maker SKF for a line of ball bearings that never reached the market.
Q 03The Smart city car began as a 1990s joint venture between Mercedes-Benz and which Swiss watch company?
Swatch
Swatch was out of the venture within weeks of the car's October 1998 launch, when Daimler-Benz took full ownership of the maker.
Q 04Which luxury marque did Henry Leland found before he started Lincoln?
Cadillac
Cadillac was bought by General Motors in 1909, but Leland quit GM in 1917 in a dispute with William Durant over war work, and started Lincoln to build Liberty aircraft engines.
Q 05Which American marque was founded in 1899 by a Scottish-born inventor of a way to enamel bathtubs?
Buick
Buick's founder sold his plumbing business to work on engines full-time, and his new company first aimed to sell engines for farm use before he turned to building a car.
Q 06The name of Hyundai, founded in 1967 by Chung Ju-yung, translates from Korean as what?
Modernity
Modernity is the meaning of Hyundai, whose cheap Pony hatchback reached Canada as a 1984 model and sold about 25,000 cars against a planned 5,000.
Q 07Which GM brand was named for an Odawa chief who led a 1763 uprising near Detroit?
Pontiac
Pontiac began in 1926 as a cheaper companion to GM's Oakland line, but it soon outsold Oakland, and in 1931 GM dropped the Oakland name in favour of Pontiac.
Q 08The name of the East German Trabant, a two-stroke people's car built from 1957, is the German word for what?
Satellite
Satellite is the astronomical sense of Trabant, a name inspired by Sputnik, and East Germans waited so many years for one that a used Trabant cost more than a new one.
Q 09The budget brand Dacia, founded in 1966, takes its name from an ancient province covering much of which modern country?
Romania
Romania's state carmaker began by building French designs under licence, and in 1999 the same French firm that had licensed them bought control of the company.
Q 10Which German marque, a GM subsidiary from 1929 until its 2017 sale to PSA, began in 1862 making sewing machines?
Opel
After Adam Opel died in 1895, his sons took up car making with Friedrich Lutzmann's designs, and the first Opel car appeared in 1899.
Q 11Brothers John and Horace Dodge built chassis for, and held 10% of, which carmaker before their own 1914 car?
Ford
Ford stopped paying special dividends to fund expansion, so the Dodge brothers sued, and in 1919 Michigan's Supreme Court made the company pay out $19 million.
Q 12Which 4x4 brand's name is often traced to Eugene, a magical 'jungle pet' in the Popeye comic strip?
Jeep
Jeep may also echo GP, for 'general purpose', but the name was surely influenced by Eugene, a creature whose whole vocabulary was the word 'jeep'.
Q 13Which Volkswagen Group marque from Mladá Boleslav began in the 1890s as Laurin & Klement, a maker of bicycles?
Škoda
Škoda's story began when Václav Klement got a rude reply to his complaint about a faulty bicycle, so he began repairing bikes himself with mechanic Václav Laurin.
Q 21Which British marque, badged with a griffin, moved its works from London to Luton in 1905?
Vauxhall
Vauxhall's griffin is said to come from the arms of Falkes de Breauté, a medieval mercenary who held the manor of Luton and whose London hall gave the district its name.
Q 22MG, whose initials stand for Morris Garages, has been owned since 2007 by which Chinese state-owned carmaker?
SAIC
SAIC lost the 2005 bidding war for MG to rival Nanjing Automobile, then got the marque anyway by taking over Nanjing at the end of 2007.
Q 23Which British marque, maker of the XK120 and XK140, traded as SS Cars until a name change in 1945?
Jaguar
Jaguar had been a model name on the firm's cars since 1935, and in 1945 it became the company name because the initials SS had gained unfavourable wartime connotations.
Q 14The name FIAT is an acronym whose final word names which city, home of Fiat's five-storey Lingotto factory?
Turin
Turin is the T in FIAT, and at Lingotto cars were built on lines rising floor by floor until finished cars drove onto a test track on the roof.
Q 15Which marque, maker of the rally-winning Stratos and Delta, was founded in 1906 by a Fiat racing driver?
Lancia
Lancia was founded by Vincenzo Lancia, Fiat's fastest driver of the day, yet after years of decline the loss-making firm was bought by Fiat itself in 1969.
Q 16Which performance marque wears a scorpion badge because its founder Carlo was born under Scorpio?
Abarth
Abarth's founder began as a motorcycle racer, and in 1934 his sidecar outfit beat the Orient Express on the run from Vienna to Ostend.
Q 17Maserati, founded in Bologna in 1914 by brothers, moved on the eve of World War II to which city?
Modena
Modena became Maserati's home, but its trident badge came from Bologna, where Mario Maserati copied it from the statue of Neptune in Piazza Maggiore.
Q 18Which Swedish hypercar maker, founded in 1994, builds its cars on a former air-force base at Ängelholm?
Koenigsegg
Koenigsegg moved into the hangar after a 2003 fire destroyed its first factory, and cars built there wear the ghost emblem of the fighter squadron once based in it.
Q 19Which Dieppe sports-car marque, dormant after 1995, was relaunched in 2017 with a new mid-engined A110?
Alpine
Alpine's revival began as a joint venture with Caterham, but Caterham sold its stake back in 2014 and the new A110 went ahead without it.
Q 20Which French carmaker formed an alliance with Nissan in 1999, later expanded to include Mitsubishi?
Renault
Renault bought into loss-making Nissan, but Nissan recovered so fast that in 2001 it agreed to buy 15% of Renault.
Q 24Charles Rolls and Henry Royce began their car partnership in 1904 in which city, where Royce already built cranes?
Manchester
Manchester was where Rolls met Royce in May 1904, and Rolls, a London car dealer, agreed to sell all the cars Royce could build as Rolls-Royces; the company itself formed in 1906.
Q 25Which small Dutch sports-car maker bought Saab Automobile from General Motors in 2010, a year before Saab's bankruptcy?
Spyker
Spyker's rescue failed when GM, whose technology Saab's cars used, blocked a sale to Chinese buyers, so the funding collapsed and Saab filed for bankruptcy in December 2011.
Q 26Which electric brand, spun out of Volvo in 2017, began as a Swedish touring-car racing team founded in 1996?
Polestar
Polestar the brand went to Volvo in 2015, but the racing team it grew from stayed with its owner and was renamed Cyan Racing.
Q 27Which name, first borne by a 1909 Zeppelin engine maker, did Mercedes-Benz revive in 2002 as an ultra-luxury marque?
Maybach
Maybach's interwar cars ranked with Mercedes in Germany's luxury class, but in the 1960s the firm came under Daimler-Benz, the owner that later revived the name.
Q 28Lada's Volga home city was renamed in 1964 after which Italian Communist leader?
Palmiro Togliatti
Palmiro Togliatti died in Yalta, in the Soviet Union, in 1964, and two years later Fiat signed the Soviet deal to build Lada's plant in the city named after him.
Q 29Which Lotus founder, whose engineering creed was 'adding lightness', died of a heart attack in 1982, aged 54?
Colin Chapman
Colin Chapman's early racing specials ran reworked engines that beat the opposition so thoroughly that the rules were changed to close the loophole he had exploited.
Q 30Which Malvern firm built only three-wheelers until its first four-wheeled car in 1936, then kept the trikes until 1952?
Morgan
Morgan's early cars had three wheels because three-wheelers counted as motorcycles, so they avoided the British tax on cars.