CAR CLASSES

segments A to F by length and bodies by box count — how to name any car you see

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: vehicles · everyone · reference · study

The length bands are a market convention (Euro Car Segment); only length is to scale in them. In the row of body styles the length is shared and the height is the ratio typical of that body, not a measurement of a model. Category M1 is Regulation (EU) 2018/858, Article 4. The volume classes are 40 CFR 600.315-08.

THE LETTERS EVERY CAR IS NAMED BY WERE NEVER DEFINED

Segments A to F first appeared in a European Commission document of 1999 — the decision on the Hyundai/Kia merger. The Commission listed them and said in the same breath that the exact market definition was left open, because the boundaries between segments are blurred by factors other than size or length.

So the system the whole European car trade runs on is a custom, not a rule. What EU law does define is category M1: up to eight passenger seats besides the driver. Length is not mentioned anywhere in it.

On the sheet

The length bands are a market convention (Euro Car Segment); only length is to scale in them. In the row of body styles the length is shared and the height is the ratio typical of that body, not a measurement of a model. Category M1 is Regulation (EU) 2018/858, Article 4. The volume classes are 40 CFR 600.315-08.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

CAR CLASSES

THE LETTERS EVERY CAR IS NAMED BY WERE NEVER DEFINED

On the sheet

Printing

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