I don't get it

"2017 Stigmata? No, that's a 2016. Notice the bulb size in the taillight array. In between the switch from 5th Gen to 6th they changed the LED bulb size from 3.3mm to 3.35, so now theres only 58 lights in the upper track."

“2017 Stigmata? No, that’s a 2016. Notice the bulb size in the taillight array. In between the switch from 5th Gen to 6th they changed the LED bulb size from 3.3mm to 3.35, so now theres only 58 lights in the upper track.”
"On the US domestic market version, sure, but on the European version (made in Dresden, not the one in made in Prague of course) they had to add the 59th light back to the upper track to comply with traffic safety laws"
- “On the US domestic market version, sure, but on the European version (made in Dresden, not the one in made in Prague of course) they had to add the 59th light back to the upper track to comply with traffic safety laws”
  That's a myth. The EU models had the 59th bulb back in because they reused the the 2016 tail light array due to an overstock of the parts after the EU demand for the 2016s was lower than expected. Also, they wouldn't need to have 59b32e tail light arrays though, the production numbers of the vehicles was too low, and therefore they did not have to comply with the minimum bulb array redundancy requirements as laid out on code 187743 subsection 22.
I admit I only know what a Stigmata is because the commercial with the guy with the bleeding hands was cool. Killer ad campaign to release them on Halloween too!

The shrimp colour vision thingy turned out to not actually be true https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578

Even "sedan" is pushing it. Car, big car, unnecessarily big car, dumpster fire.

unnecessarily big car
- Very true.
- This comment was made by a pixie.

I can identify make and model but NEVER the year.

But my mostly-deaf husband can identify motorcycles BY SOUND (or lack thereof).

I can pretty much always do make.
Model for fun cars but not boring ones/trucks/vans/suvs.
Year for the outstanding exemplary best model years of the fun ones.
- Any more, cars change very little between years. Sometimes hard to tell even after a "refresh" in the middle of a generation. My kid thinks it's a superpower that I can tell the differences between generations of Corvettes. Like dude, I've had car magazines in my hands since I was half your age.
There are generations. Like the same body style for several years.
Your husband and I could be best friends because I also have poor hearing and can do the same thing with motorcycles with a pretty high success rate.
We can sit in the same room not talking. Then one of us will think the other said something and yell "Huh?". The other will loudly reply "What?". Then that'll go on for several minutes until we both smile and nod.
- 😂 that happens sometimes with TV voices. He'll think I said something and I just look at the TV like..."Yeah that was them." He does wear hearing aids, which work well 95% of the time. That 5% when they don't work can be ROUGH.
I consider myself hard of hearing, but only at certain frequencies. I can hear lower (bass) sounds much better than mid range sounds; high pitch sounds hurt like a mother!
I have a very bad sense of smell - not sure if it's technically anosmia but if not it's close - but the few things I can smell, I can smell very well and usually identify pretty quickly.

Reminds me of XKCD 915

https://xkcd.com/915/

https://xkcd.com/2501/
Amazing how there really is an XKXD for everything 😘👌
- an XKXD for everything
  https://www.xkcd.com/1460/
This just... isn't true though. There are tons of things we spend time on and don't become snobs about.
Many people watch a ton of movies but don't care all that much.

ooh a mazda miata/mx5 na
- The distorted perspective made me think rx7 at first.

I ran into someone and I said "How's the Corolla Cross?" and she looked at me shocked and said "No one knows what car that is?! How do you know?" I was like "Headlights? Body shape? Too small to be a Rav4, too high to be a Corolla."

Basically, I would've written autistic guide books on local ferns if I'd been born a couple decades earlier, someone had just already written them. Same with birding. Ain't found a new bird in a while.

Saw a presentation of someone visting remote islands and discovering new types of ferns. Talked about contributing to the the open database of ferns: https://fernphy.github.io/ Never too late!

My partner is like this with birds xD

me: "Oh look, a starling!"

him: "Yep, it's a bird."

(though to be fair, he's getting better at it :P)

It's the Merlin app, isn't it? They were all just "birds" to me before I started identifying their calls... and it's a fast pipeline from there to borderline "birdwatching". What has my life become?
- I love Merlin :) It helped me learn to recognise so many local birdsongs!
Look, Raymond. A yellow crested warbler.
Used a bird call app over in western Melbourne and it insisted we could hear a starling. Bloody things are everywhere in England and I don’t know one when i hear it.
- Tbh starlings have an extremely varied repertoire. When I'm passing near a singing one here in Scotland, for the several minutes that I'm in hearing range, it never repeats the same tune. Pretty amazing!

Imagine being envious of someone with basic memorization skills.

Where's the envy? Also it's more about being interested in the subject matter than inherent ability.
What makes you think they’re envious?
I get what you're saying in terms of "anyone can do this if they're willing to devote enough time to a specific / niche subject matter" but I think you're stating it somewhat reductively (and your tone seems questionable but that could just be a textual communication issue).
I find that I have poor rote memorization skills but that I'm very good at conceptual reasoning using lots of different information from very tangentially related subject matters. So I don't know too much about chemistry, metalworking, and sewing on their own, but I know enough to pick out the right fabric, thread, jewelry findings, and dye, and what order to use them in to get a pretty cool result.
I think that ability actually somewhat necessarily comes at the expense of my rote memorization capabilities. To put that in plainer language, I think a lot of people can be in love with the world as a whole or deeply in love with just a few parts of it (me being the former). And while the important thing in the end is that you find something out there in the world to love and accept yourself for loving it, it's also not maladaptive to see someone else do something cool and think,"I might not have time in my life to pick up that skill, but I bet it feels good to be able to do it." And who knows? Maybe if they're envious enough they'll make time in their life to learn how to do the cool thing.

I’m pretty good at that and I don’t know why. I guess I just passively pay a lot of attention to car makes/models for some reason.

It has been becoming harder, though.
Not only are most cars looking alike nowadays, but manufacturers are also mostly not putting model name badges on their cars any more... :-(
- Except for the models where they put the name in huge indented letters on the tailgate of hatch like the M A V E R I C K.
- And they're all grey.
  My friend had a grey SUV that for the life of me I could not find in a parking lot. So many gray SUVs that all look the same...
  I hate the vehicle color trend of Depression Grey. And blue. And mold green.
For me, it's fun being able to identify things correctly. I was playing that color HEX code guessing game for a bit on !dailygames@lemmy.zip, and it's the same feeling.

Isn't this the case for any hobby or niche field?

The difference is that we all come into contact with and have to deal with cars on some level whereas in case of a niche hobby people may not even know it exists. Cars are such a central part of modern life that it feels weird that some people seem to have occult insight into it that others lack. It's both a niche hobby and not niche at all at the same time, in a way.
- Cars are such a central part of modern life
  I think that depends a lot on where you live. The vast majority of my colleagues and friends don't have cars, but we live in large UK cities, so life is easily doable without a car. Even a friend who used to have a car ended up selling it, bc he just didn't use it enough to justify the costs.

All it required for me was to be in the market for a new car. Then I started paying more attention to what make and model every car on the road was and it's stuck with me ever since.

I never knew one school bus from another, they were all just big yellow boxes. Then I started looking to buy a used one and somehow I can now tell make, model and year of every single one I see. I know what engines and transmissions they all have. I can even tell my district's buses apart from the neighboring district's buses although they're exactly the same buses, even if I can't see the lettering or numbers on the sides. And yet somehow I'm still single!
- Ill marry you and we can ride off into the sunset in your skoolie.

My dad can look up and tell a 767 from an a330 passing over at 37,000ft. I work as a commercial pilot and tell the difference when ones parked at the terminal still. It must be some spicy brain shit

I pity y'all, the roads are so beautiful to me.

Yes. This was it for me. I spent enough time in traffic that I just memorized which car was which.
If I go out driving now, which is fairly rare, I'm always going, I don't recognize that car, what is it ??
And the cycle continues.

I feel this way but about people identifying dogs

Whoa!

Spritz

Wipe

Is that a Supra?!

2jz !!!

I'm perfectly fine identifying cars that have proper names, but the mid-luxury brands (BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Infiniti, etc.) eschew names for alphanumeric gibberish. I can't be arsed to remember all their numbering schemes. And Teslas largely look the same to me unless they look distinctly like a dumpster. I can't tell an S from a 3, or a Y from an X.

My friends will be like YO DID YOU SEE THAT HONKAI G600 and lose their shit and I look over and it's just a regular looking sedan

There's an older Toyota sedan called the crown that actually came with the inline 6 cylinder made famous in the supra. Super boring looking, but incredibly cool car. I pointed one out to an Uber passenger the other day and got the same reaction.
- There is both a new Crown and an imported 90s S150 Crown in my area and the existence of the new one always makes me sad because my brain sees it more often than the other one...

I learned to do this when I was younger by just having really good eyes and reading the back labels of cats sincr they usually have their names on them

Always found cats names on their collars myself. Where do you live that they're putting them on the back? And why is that helpful?
- You've never seen a cathole tattooed with its name, you've never lived
The back labels are why cats sniff each other’s bums when they meet.

My (who I subsequently learnt very autistic) friend could identify the state of origin of number plates of cars based on their text colour. Some states had number plates written in slightly different shades of blue so this wasn’t that easy.

For them to remember the make and model was easy.

I'm not autistic, but I get this. It pisses me off when states change their designs AND the color palette, and it's not a huge change. Why not just kick me in the junk while you're at it?

2017 chevy stigmaballs

the stig's american cousin's car?

Shrimps cant see extra colors though. They are just too dumb to mix basic colors in their brain, instead just evolved extra color receptors

I'm like this with plants, too.

I was a bit like that too, but since I started using Flora Incognita, I'm actually recognising different trees as I'm walking on the street, even without the app 🤯
- Thanks, that app looks pretty promising! I've been using Merlin to identify bird calls, and now I've started being able to identify birds by sight or sound without the app

I'm more discerning regarding the model of my first car, or similar models. Got used to finding that car in a parking lot, etc.

I used to be able to detect a 90s Chrysler/Dodge engine by their sound. It was very distinctive across the whole range.

Not a lot of those survived. Their transmissions sucked ass. I don't think I could do it anymore.

The Chrysler/Dodge 5.7L V8 "HEMI" engine has a distinct sound as well. They put that engine in all their cars, trucks, and SUVs from 2000 almost to the current day.
If you hear a car that sounds like a box of metal shavings dumped in a food processor... That's a Ford Focus. I know them by the sound of the transmission alone.

Lol, I can tell engines apart just based on sound....

I still have a soft spot for the sound of a boxer engine
oof you shouldn't put engines there

When I used to watch commercials¹, this shit would just register itself in my brain, lurking silently for when/if it comes up. I'm not even a "car guy" by any stretch of the imagination, and credit this mostly to the insidious and brain-worm-like quality of car advertising. For a while there, I could identify most cars just by seeing the shape and position of the headlamps at night. It is/was the most useless superpower, and I'm still a little spooked that one can be low-key programmed like this.

I suppose it's possible to come by this while racking up commuter hours, since the make/model is usually right there on the back of most cars, but that doesn't explain the headlamp thing.

¹ - I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how one might dispose of most advertising when watching shows.

Meh same with dog, tree, flower, architecture, bird, etc, people.

Spanish Revival

Sedan? Yeah no. Brown car. Saying sedan makes you sound like some kind of car expert.

Do you know why a chicken coop has two doors? If it had four, it'd be a chicken sedan

I used to be like that back in highschool/college when I was more into cars. It was fun being able to find the small details of the car to single out which year model it was and stuff like that.

Now, I don't have the time or interested to do that any more.

So true. I work on vehicles every day and I still have to look at the logo on the bumper every time

Are you a mechanic?
- No I'm just a guy

https://youtu.be/6Ykj9sluvYI

If it's trains or planes on the other hand...

I recognize one particular vehicle that lives near my house quite well, since it looks like Calculon as a werecar. It's even orange. (I think it's a Jeep?)

That sounds like a modded Jeep. I love that description by the way.

Haha thats me. Just was always into knowing what I was looking at. Comes in really handy too.

Knowing the headlight shape of Chevy Impala, and Ford interceptors at night is handy to know when you are speeding towards a cop on a lonely highway.
- Part of the reason I learned quick;)
  Never had a ticket though.