What is car spotting? The hobby explained

Car spotting is the hobby of finding interesting cars out in the real world and photographing them, from supercars and rare classics to limited editions and unusual everyday cars. Car spotters keep a record of what they find, share the best ones with other enthusiasts and learn to recognise cars at a glance. All you need to start is a phone.

What do car spotters do?

Most car spotting happens on ordinary streets. A spotter sees something worth a second look, takes a photo and works out exactly what it is: the make, the model, the generation and often the precise version. You'll also hear it called carspotting or, when the targets are exotic, supercar spotting.

Every spotter has their own targets. The most popular are:

• Supercars and hypercars, the headline finds, which gather in wealthy city districts and at big events.
• Classics and modern classics, from 1960s sports cars to the hot hatches of the 1980s and 1990s.
• Rare versions of normal cars, such as performance models, limited editions and unusual colours that most people walk straight past.
• Cars from small makers and from abroad, which are rarely sold in the UK.
• Firsts: the first time you see a brand-new model out on the road.

Where car spotting came from

People have always stopped to look at special cars, but car spotting as a hobby with its own name grew up with digital cameras and the internet. In the mid-2000s, spotters started sharing their photos on websites built for the purpose, such as ExoticSpotter, and by 2006 the hobby was big enough for the Los Angeles Times to write about it.

YouTube and social media took it further. Some of the best-known car channels began as spotting channels: Shmee150, one of the biggest supercar channels on YouTube, started out filming the cars its creator spotted. Today there are spotters all over the world, and cities where supercars gather, such as London, Dubai and Monaco, draw spotters from far and wide.

Is car spotting legal?

In the UK, taking photos of cars from a public place, such as a pavement, is generally fine. Private property is different: on a dealership forecourt, a hotel driveway or at a private event, the owner sets the rules and can ask you to stop or leave.

How to start car spotting

1. Use your phone. Its camera is all you need. A zoom lens helps for cars across the street, but it isn't essential.
2. Start on your everyday routes. Interesting cars turn up in supermarket car parks and on the school run. Once you start looking, you'll be surprised how much you've been missing.
3. Go where the cars are. Car meets, shows and race days put dozens of special cars in one place. Our UK car events calendar lists the biggest ones.
4. Learn the details. Badges, lights and wheels separate one version from another. Our guide to identifying a car from a photo explains what to look at.
5. Work out how old it is. On UK cars, the number plate shows roughly when the car was first registered. Our number plate age checker decodes current, prefix and suffix plates.

Car spotting as a game

Collecting is what keeps many spotters going. Some keep folders of photos, others tick cars off a list. In CarSpot, every car you snap becomes a card in your garage, with specs, an estimated value and a rarity tier, and rarer cars earn more XP.

Most of what you'll see on the road is everyday: 66% of the 5,224 cars in CarSpot are Common or Uncommon. That's what makes the rarer tiers worth hunting for. Read how CarSpot rarity works to see what each tier means. Rarity is a collectible game mechanic, not an assessment of real-world scarcity or value.

Spotting works as a family game too. The Yellow Car game is the classic, and there are plenty more in our list of car spotting games for road trips.