A car collecting game for iPhone
Every car you pass on the street is a card waiting to be caught. Photograph real cars with the in-app camera, build a collection ranked by how many were actually made, then send your best five into automated races.
The loop
Three steps, always in this order. You can't race a car you haven't seen with your own eyes.
Walk, drive, wait at a red light. Anything on four wheels in the real world can be caught: a daily commuter, a weekend roadster, a supercar parked downtown.
Take the photo with the StreetCaught camera and frame the car. Too close? Slide the zoom down to switch to the ultra-wide lens. An AI identifies the make and model, then the card is revealed with your own framed photo, its real specs, its rarity and a random finish. When it can't tell two generations apart, you pick the right one: you're the one looking at the car.
Pick five cards for five events. You don't drive: the race is simulated from each car's stats, the track and the surface. Your job is choosing the right car for each event.
Rule 1 · Rarity
A card's tier is set by how many units of that generation were really built. It never depends on luck or on the player. Common cars are common because the streets are full of them.
| Tier | Units produced | Neon glow | Typical cars | Scan XP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 300,001+ | None | High-volume sedans and SUVs | 10 |
| Uncommon | 100,001 – 300,000 | None | Everyday models late in their run | 20 |
| Rare | 20,001 – 100,000 | None | Production sports cars | 40 |
| Epic | 3,001 – 20,000 | Violet | Focused sports cars | 90 |
| Legendary | 1,001 – 3,000 | Gold, sweeping | Supercars | 210 |
| Mythic | 51 – 1,000 | Red, sweeping | Hypercars | 510 |
| One-off | 50 or fewer | Pink, sweeping | One-offs and prototypes | 1,200 |
From Epic up, the card glows in its tier color. From Legendary up, a brighter spot slowly travels around the frame. The first time you catch a model, its XP is tripled.
A car becomes a classic 30 years after its generation stopped being built. The end of production counts, not the start, so even the last car off the line is 30. Nobody picks favourites: it's an age, and every January 1st another year of cars joins the club.
A classic trades its tier border for a thicker wooden frame with real grain. The tier still shows in the text, the glow and the word at the bottom of the card.
| Classic today | Built until | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Ferrari F40 | 1992 | Mythic |
| Lamborghini Countach LP400 | 1978 | Mythic |
| BMW M3 (E30) | 1991 | Legendary |
| DeLorean DMC-12 | 1983 | Mythic |
258 models in the catalog are classics today.
Where the real production figure is unknown, the card carries a small EST. badge. Estimated entries never land above Rare: the top tiers are reserved for the 259 cars whose numbers have been checked by hand. A figure that only counts US sales, not worldwide production, can lift a card to Rare at most.
The catalog
StreetCaught recognizes 3,169 models, from everyday sedans to one-offs. Search by make, model, generation or year to see whether a car is in, and what tier its card lands in.
Rule 2 · Finishes
Rarity belongs to the car. The finish belongs to your copy, rolled fresh on every scan. A holo Corolla is possible, and that's on purpose. The border tells you the tier, the background tells you the finish.
Finish odds per scan
One scan in ten gets a finish, and one in a hundred is a full Holo. A finish with a holo foil on top is the rarest roll in the game: about one card in 1,100.
Carbon, Forged and Holo cards take the colour of the car's tier. A Legendary holo glows gold, a Mythic forged card has red resin flakes. Gold and Silver keep their brushed metal.
One card in a hundred that already has a finish also gets a holo foil laid over it: a Gold Holo, a Carbon Holo. It keeps its own background and adds the foil that lights up when the light passes. That foil can be any of the seven holo patterns (Liquid, Chrome, Sheen, Glitter, Dots, Rings or Shards), each with its own number. On a Minimal card it shows as a ★.
A holo foil only shows inside the band of light that crosses the card when you tilt your phone. Carbon is a material: you see it even in the shade, and the light adds a shine on top. Holo patterns carry a number from 0 to 999, so no two copies shine the same way.
Full shows everything: the car picture running edge to edge with its name printed on it, generation and year, the four stats with bars, the real specs (0-100 km/h, top speed, power, torque, drive and fuel) and the money block (MSRP and market range).
Minimal keeps only what you need to pick a car: the picture with the model name, the drivetrain, the four stats and the Power. That's the view for comparing five cars at a glance. Switch between them in the garage.
The number in the bottom corner is the car's Power, from 20 to 100. It's what counts against your hand budget. The letter says the same thing at a glance:
| Letter | F | E | D | C | B | A | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Power | 20–39 | 40–49 | 50–59 | 60–69 | 70–79 | 80–89 | 90+ |
Finishes are cosmetic. They never change race stats, so scanning the same car every day doesn't buy you speed.
Rule 3 · Racing
Every card lists the car's real figures: 0–100 km/h, top speed, power, torque, redline, drivetrain. The game turns them into four stats from 1 to 100.
A real race from the game
Same six tracks, physics and cars as the app. Pick an event, the weather and two cars: on the snowy hill climb, a supercar with 105 mm of ground clearance and performance tires doesn't get far, while on the dry ring or the oval raw top speed wins.
Rule 4 · Campaign
Ten levels per country, five races per level. The events and the rival's hand are fixed, so you can study them before you pick your five cards. Each country opens at a player level and adds one condition you haven't had to handle yet. Every rival car comes from the country you're racing in: Hyundai and Kia in Korea, Volvo and Saab in Sweden, Ferrari and Lamborghini in Italy.
| Country | What it adds | Opens at level | Power cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Korea | Dry asphalt only. Learn the events. | 1 | 275 |
| United States | Rain and long straights | 6 | 300 |
| Sweden | Snow, ice and rally | 11 | 325 |
| Japan | Tight mountain roads, at night | 16 | 350 |
| Germany | Flat-out top speed, no limit | 21 | 375 |
| United Kingdom | Gravel and forest rally stages | 26 | 400 |
| Italy | Nothing new: everything at once, against the fastest field | 31 | 450 |
Stars come from your share of the points, not the number of events won. Dominating three events beats scraping four. Three stars need 80% of the points.
Three stars on level 5 and level 10 of a country earn a part, the first time only. The level 10 part comes with much better odds.
The last level of the campaign gives a guaranteed Legendary part. Elsewhere, only an event podium can roll one.
Coming back to an early country with a stronger garage? Your hand is capped at that country's Power, so it stays a real race.
Rule 5 · Events
The campaign rewards progress. Events reward a wide garage. Every Monday two new challenges open, one easy and one hard, and each one asks for five different cars that all meet the same condition.
Uncommon or better, all-wheel drive, or cars built in the USA, Japan or Germany. A garage of thirty cars usually has five that qualify.
Rare or better, Toyota only, BMW only, or built in the United Kingdom. You need to have looked for these cars to line up five.
Eight rivals sit on the board, from −8 to +8 points. You enter in the middle at zero. Each race is against the rival just above you.
You never see the rival's cars before the start, so you build a hand instead of answering one. Winning earns stars that the rival loses, and losing works the other way, so the board reshuffles after every race.
After the eighth race, your place is final. The top three win a part: 80% at the promised tier, 15% one tier up, 5% two tiers up. That makes a Legendary possible: 20% for winning a hard event, 5% for second place in a hard event or first in an easy one.
An event race costs one fuel, like a campaign race. Rivals are calibrated on your best legal hand at the start of the week, so a car you catch or a part you fit mid-week shows up as places on the board.
Rule 6 · Friends
No server, no account. You set the rules, pick your five cars, and the game turns it all into a short code. Send it by text, Discord or anything else. Your friend pastes it, picks five cars without seeing yours, and the race plays out on their phone.
A Power cap, one car rule (any car, a drivetrain, a rarity, one make or one country) and the five events with their weather. Draw them at random or pick each one.
Your cars travel with their upgrades and parts, and with their finish: a holo card arrives as that same holo, same pattern number.
Your friend pastes it in Friends → Join a game. Both phones compute exactly the same result from the same code, so nobody can argue about who won.
The Power cap replaces both players' own limit, and it can go up to 500, higher than anyone reaches by leveling. A level 5 player and a level 40 player race with exactly the same budget, and it's the only place in the game where the five most expensive cars fit in one hand.
Want your friend to see your actual photos? Tap Send with photos instead: the challenge goes out as a small .streetcaught file that opens straight in the app. Cards that came from a pack show their silhouette.
Rule 7 · Quests & series
Quests are the first tab of the app. Every day at midnight UTC you get three: one easy, one medium, one hard. There's always something you can finish in twenty minutes, and always one worth going out for.
Catch 2 cars, or run 2 races. Whatever you were going to do today anyway.
Catch 3 cars of one body style (SUVs, coupes, pickups…) or one drivetrain (RWD, AWD, FWD, 4WD). Or catch 5 cars, or run 6 races.
Catch 3 of one make, 2 cars Uncommon or better or Rare or better, 4 of one drivetrain, or win 3 races in a row. A loss resets that last one to zero.
| Quest | Coins | Common | Uncommon | Rare | Epic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 200 | 80% | 17% | 3% | — |
| Medium | 650 | 52% | 32% | 13% | 3% |
| Hard | 1,600 | 26% | 34% | 28% | 12% |
Each quest pays either coins or a random part, and the card tells you which before you start. Part odds climb with difficulty. Quests never give a Legendary: those come from the campaign and event podiums.
A quest you can't finish, like "Catch 3 BMW" in a neighborhood without any, can be swapped. Watch an ad for three new quests, up to three times a day. New quests start from zero.
A single catch counts for every quest it fits. An AWD Subaru moves "Catch 5 cars" and "Catch 3 AWD cars" at the same time. Makes in quests are ones you see everywhere: Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW and the like.
Next to the daily quests, the Series tab holds 57 long-term collections. They never reset. Each one has tiers, every tier pays coins and XP, and a finished series turns green and drops to the bottom of the list.
Every card counts, duplicates included: 10, 50, 100… up to 1,000 Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota, Honda and 12 other brands. Plus model lines like Civic, Corolla, Mustang or Corvette, and "every model" series for those same 16 brands.
Every brand in the catalog, every body style, seven countries of origin, and every car of a given rarity. Here only new ones count, so you have to go looking.
The three sisters (Subaru BRZ, Toyota 86, Scion FR-S), every Mustang platform from Fox to S650, every Corvette from C4 to C8. Plus electric and hybrid cars, $100k+ cars and 1,000 hp hypercars.
| Tier target | 1 | 5 | 10 | 50 | 100 | 500 | 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coins | 100 | 325 | 575 | 2,050 | 3,575 | 12,975 | 22,600 |
| XP | 25 | 80 | 145 | 510 | 895 | 3,245 | 5,650 |
Series count every car you've ever scanned, even the cards you later deleted or let go from the waiting queue. Filter the list by brand, model, rarity, country, body, fuel, luxury or variety to find the next one within reach.
Rule 8 · The Workshop
Duplicates aren't wasted. Catch the same model again, any generation, and it becomes fuel for the Workshop. Everything is stored per model: if you own three Civics, you sacrifice two to upgrade "the Civic", and that's the one you race.
More power.
Level 1 opens the Turbo slot
Level 3 opens the Transmission slot
Less mass.
Level 1 opens the Carbon slot
Level 3 opens the Wheels slot
More cornering grip, better brakes.
Level 1 opens the Suspension slot
Level 3 opens the Aero slot
| Level | Engine power | Weight | Chassis grip | Duplicates | Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +4% | −4% | +4% | 1 | Power × 11 |
| 2 | +9% | −9% | +9% | 2 | Power × 27 |
| 3 | +15% | −15% | +15% | 3 | Power × 63 |
Coin costs follow the car's Power, so tuning a hypercar costs far more than tuning a city car. A tuned car's Power goes up too: faster in one event, less room in your hand for the other four.
A part never says "better in the rain". It changes something physical (power, mass, top speed, downforce, launch traction, braking, tire grip on each surface) and the race physics decides where that pays off. A GT wing adds downforce, which helps in corners. A drag race has no corners, so there it only costs you drag.
Parts come in Common ×1, Uncommon ×1.3, Rare ×1.7, Epic ×2.3 and Legendary ×3. The tier multiplies the bonus, never the penalty: a Legendary slick grips better on dry asphalt and slides exactly as much on snow. From Epic up, most parts become different hardware, like a twin turbo instead of a single.
Each big slot takes its own family: turbo, transmission, carbon, wheels, suspension, aero. Small slots take brakes, an exhaust or a set of tires. Every car has one small slot from the start, and a second one can be bought for a single model. A part can only sit on one car at a time.
Races drop parts up to Epic: Common 56%, Uncommon 28%, Rare 12%, Epic 4%. Legendary parts never drop from ordinary races. You get one by winning the last level of the campaign, or with luck on an event podium.
Rule 9 · The Shop
The Shop puts three parts on the shelf every 24 hours, each from a different family. Don't like them? Watch an ad to reroll, up to three times a day. That counter is separate from your gauges, so an ad watched for fuel never costs you a reroll.
| Tier | Price | On the shelf |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 600 coins | Often |
| Uncommon | 1,600 coins | Regularly |
| Rare | 4,000 coins | Sometimes |
| Epic | 12,000 coins | Rarely |
| Legendary | — | Never sold. Won in the campaign or on an event podium. |
The shelf comes from the day itself, so closing and reopening the app never reshuffles it.
Rule 10 · Energy & fair play
Scanning and racing each draw from their own gauge. Both fill back up to the top once a day.
Up to 5 rewarded ads per day. Taking, framing or discarding a photo is free. A charge goes the moment the AI answers, whatever it says, because every answer costs a real call. If the photo never reaches it (no signal, server down, unreadable file), nothing is charged.
A catch made with a full garage isn't lost: the car goes into your Dex and the card waits in a 3-slot queue until you free up space. A fourth catch pushes out the oldest one. Nothing leaves the queue without you tapping Add to my collection.
A full workshop can't take a new part from a quest or a race reward. Delete parts you'll never fit. If the last copy is fitted to a car, the game warns you first that the car loses it.
Tap Batch in the Collection, pick cars, and delete their copies in one go. The count shows cars and cards, so five copies of one car read as five.
Favourite and locked cards are always kept, even when you select them in a batch. The game tells you how many it skipped.
The delete button unlocks after a few seconds, long enough to read what you're about to lose. There's no undo, so the wait is on purpose.
250 at level 1, up to 450 at level 41. It's the only thing that opens races you couldn't enter the day before.
200 coins for level 2, 3,000 for level 30.
Common or better before level 10, then Uncommon, Rare, and Epic or better from level 30.
Questions
128 answers, searchable, on their own page.
Car photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licenses, resized and cropped for the cards. Click a license to see the original file.