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I remember as a kid, I was mystified by this other girl on the block who could do this. I didn't understand why anyone would care. A car is a car?
Eventually I realized it's because she was super into external social status signs. She wasn't a gearhead, so she hadn't picked it up the way guys do bonding over technical stats of whatever, but she was hyper-sensitive to social status, so she picked it up along with anything else related to fashion. And cars can be considered fashion, right up there with makeup and having the right purse.
I don't see it as a status symbol, although I'm certain that is a huge part of it for a lot of people, but fashion part is right. Cars have design styles, motifs, and trends. I don't know the names for most of them, but I can normally place a car in a 3 year range on sight. Make and model are also often very obvious through those same features, even across a larger number of years, slowly transitioning from one "age' of car design to another. I'm not a car person, but I am, in weird ways, a design nerd.
Oh, with me it's shapes, I rely on general shapes slightly nontypically - humans included, I have fairy bad face memory & face recognition, but shapes are easy (and it's more nuanced that just a general shape of the humanoid, gaining or losing weight doesn't change it beyond recognition - like cars/boats/equipment/tools/etc, it's "important" info to understand the underlying build).