Classic Car Trivia
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98 free Classic Car trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Any color so long as it's black. This old car trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers about the classic, vintage and antique automobiles that still stop traffic: the Benz Patent-Motorwagen and Curved Dash Oldsmobile, the Model T and Model A, Duesenbergs and Bugatti Royales, the '57 Bel Air, the first Corvette and Thunderbird, Citroën's hydropneumatic DS, the Mini, the E-Type and the gullwing 300 SL, the Tucker, the Edsel, the Corvair, the DeLorean and the Trabant. The early questions are the ones any car-show regular can field: what the Tin Lizzie was, where the Beetle came from, which car Bond drove. Then it gets tougher, with production numbers, engineers and designers, record-setting launches, famous failures and the club definitions that decide what counts as an antique. Bring it to a cruise night, a garage quiz or a long drive. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on each car and topic, and each question links to the page and sentence that supports it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Antique Automobile Club of America defines an antique car as being at least how old?
25 years
25 years. The club once froze its classes at a fixed 1935 cutoff, then switched in 1975 to a rolling rule, so another model year of cars turns antique every year.
Q 02The Classic Car Club of America lists only 'fine' or 'distinctive' cars built from 1915 to 1948; which car makes the list?
Cadillac V-16
Cadillac V-16. The club admits only costly, limited-production cars, so the mass-produced Model T is shut out even though its dates fit, and nothing built after 1948 gets in at all.
Q 03To car collectors, the 'vintage' era begins the year after which event ended?
World War I
World War I. The vintage years are usually counted from 1919 to about 1930, a decade in which the typical new car went from an open tourer to a closed saloon.
Q 04What was the nickname of the Ford Model T?
Tin Lizzie
Tin Lizzie. The assembly line let Ford cut the touring car's price from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by 1925.
Q 05Early Ford Model Ts came in gray, green, blue or red; which single color then replaced them all until 1925?
Black
Black. By his own account Henry Ford told his staff in 1909 that buyers could have any color 'so long as it is black', years before the one-color rule actually took effect.
Q 06The Ford Model T's record of 15 million cars built stood until 1972, when which car overtook it?
Volkswagen Beetle
Volkswagen Beetle. A British Army major, Ivan Hirst, got its war-damaged factory running again in 1945, and in February 1972 the 15,007,034th car off the line took the record.
Q 07The Ford Model A of 1927 was among the first production cars fitted with what?
Safety glass in the windshield
It was also the first Ford with a conventional clutch, brake and gearshift layout, though the brake and throttle pedals were reversed from today's.
Q 08Years before Ford's moving line, which American make built its Curved Dash runabout on an early assembly line from 1901?
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile. A 1901 factory fire left the little Curved Dash the one model saved, and Ransom Olds said that settled which car to build; it is credited as the first mass-produced car.
Q 09As Benz patented his three-wheeler in 1886, which German motorized a four-wheeled coach?
Daimler
Daimler. Gottlieb Daimler and his partner had tried their engine on a motorcycle the year before, and in 1926 his company merged with Benz's to form Daimler-Benz.
Q 10On her 1888 drive, Bertha Benz bought fuel at what kind of shop?
Pharmacy
A pharmacy, now billed as the first filling station. Petrol was then sold by chemists as a cleaning solvent, and on the same trip she unblocked the fuel line with a hatpin and insulated a wire with her garter.
Q 11Which British make's 40/50 hp model of 1907 was hailed by the motoring press as 'the best car in the world'?
Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce. Only one car, registered AX 201, was named Silver Ghost; the press gave the name to every 40/50, and the company did not adopt it officially until 1925.
Q 12Brothers Fred and August founded which American marque, the first from the US to win the French Grand Prix?
Duesenberg
Duesenberg. Jimmy Murphy won it in 1921, then had the same car fitted with a Miller engine and drove it to victory in the Indianapolis 500 the following year.
Q 13Which carmaker began in South Bend, Indiana, in 1852 as a builder of horse-drawn wagons?
Studebaker
Q 21Porsche is tied to Stuttgart, but its first production car, the 356, was initially built in which country in 1948?
Austria
Austria. About 50 cars were hand-built with aluminium bodies in the village of Gmünd before production moved to Zuffenhausen, in Stuttgart, in 1950 and switched to steel.
Q 22What made the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL of 1954 instantly recognizable?
Gullwing doors
Gullwing doors. The racing-style tubular frame ran so high along the sides that ordinary doors would not fit, so they were hinged at the roof; US importer Max Hoffman had talked Mercedes into a road version.
Q 23The 1955 Citroën DS was the first mass-produced car to make a success of which kind of brakes?
Disc brakes
Studebaker. Already the world's leading maker of horse-drawn vehicles, it began selling electric cars in 1902 and petrol ones in 1904, yet went on building wagons for years afterwards.
Q 14Packard built its luxury cars in Detroit for half a century, but in which state was the first one made in 1899?
Ohio
Ohio. James Ward Packard built it in his home town of Warren after he complained about his Winton car and its maker told him, in effect, to go and build his own.
Q 15Which 1934 Chrysler, shaped in a wind tunnel with advice from Orville Wright, was the first streamlined full-size American production car?
Airflow
Airflow. Its engineers tested dozens of scale models and found that the boxy cars of the day cut through the air better when driven backwards.
Q 16Which Lincoln began in 1939 as a one-off convertible built for the Ford president's Florida vacation?
Continental
Continental. The European-looking one-off drew so much interest from would-be buyers in Florida that Lincoln put it into production.
Q 17Which World War II vehicle did Willys and Ford build to one shared design?
The jeep
The jeep. More than 600,000 were built as the Allies' standard light runabout, and Willys had a civilian version on sale under the Jeep name before 1945 was out.
Q 18Which French car was designed to cross a ploughed field with a basket of eggs on the seat without breaking one?
Citroën 2CV
Citroën 2CV. Pierre Boulanger wanted a car to replace the horse and cart for French farmers, so its soft, long-travel suspension was built for rutted fields, not paved roads.
Q 19Which engineer led the design of the 'people's car' that Hitler ordered in the 1930s?
Ferdinand Porsche
Ferdinand Porsche. Hitler set the brief: room for two adults and three children, and no more than seven litres of fuel per 100 km.
Q 20Dutch importer Ben Pon's 1947 notebook sketch became which Volkswagen, launched three years later?
The Microbus
The Microbus. Pon had watched a makeshift parts cart trundle round the factory on a Volkswagen chassis and drew a box with the driver up front; the notebook is now in the Rijksmuseum.
Disc brakes. The American Crosley had tried them in 1949 and soon gone back to drums; the DS kept the same front discs through its whole twenty-year run.
Q 24Which car's 2016 launch broke the Citroën DS's 1955 record for advance orders?
Tesla Model 3
Tesla Model 3. About 180,000 people put down $1,000 within a day, many before the car had even been shown; the DS had taken 80,000 orders over the ten days of the Paris show.
Q 25The 1959 Mini saved space by building its gearbox into what?
The engine's sump
The engine's sump. Gearbox and engine shared one oil supply under a sideways-mounted motor, which made the tiny car remarkably roomy inside.
Q 26Which crisis, by bringing petrol rationing back to Britain, led BMC to commission the Mini?
The Suez Crisis
The Suez Crisis. Rationing in 1956 sank big-car sales and made German bubble cars fashionable, so BMC ordered a proper small car, sold from 1959 as the Austin Seven and Morris Mini-Minor.
Q 27The Jaguar XK-E, as Americans knew it, was based on which of the marque's Le Mans-winning racers?
The D-Type
The D-Type. It won Le Mans in 1955, 1956 and 1957, and the same aerodynamicist, Malcolm Sayer, then shaped the road car; leftover racers were even sold as street-legal XKSS models.
Q 28What was the Aston Martin DB5's first James Bond film?
Goldfinger
Goldfinger. Ian Fleming's novel had put Bond in an older Aston, the DB Mark III; the film's effects chief talked the company into lending its DB5 prototype, then filled it with gadgets.
Q 29Which British roadster, launched in 1962 and built until 1980, sold more than half a million with its hardtop GT sibling?
MGB
MGB. It swapped the separate chassis of earlier MG sports cars for a one-piece body shell, and when the last one was built in 1980 the Abingdon factory closed with it.
Q 30Which Italian city car of 1957 had a rear-mounted two-cylinder engine?
Fiat 500
Fiat 500. Dante Giacosa designed it, and on the car's fiftieth anniversary in 2007 Fiat brought the shape back as a new 500, this time with the engine at the front.