Vanessa Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.
Can you talk about your car in English? Let's do it.
Today, you are going to learn a lot of car vocabulary. We'll talk about types of cars, and also different parts of the car on the outside and the inside. I am not a mechanic, so these are all words that are known to normal people in everyday conversation. These are not specialized terms. If you have a car, and if you need to explain different parts of your car in English, this is the vocabulary lesson for you. First, let's talk about different types of cars.
This is a compact car. These are usually the smallest kinds of cars. Then we have a sedan.
A sedan is a little bit bigger, and it has usually four doors. This is a convertible or a convertible car. The roof of a convertible car can open. This is a hatchback. A hatchback has a special back part that opens up. This allows you to carry more stuff, and it can be convenient if you often travel or carry large things like a dog crate, it can be helpful to have a hatchback.
A pickup truck, or a pickup, or a truck. In a lot of places around the world, most people in daily life don't have a pickup truck because they don't need to carry lots of things, only if it's needed maybe for your job, but in the US it is very common for normal people who don't need this type of car for their job to just have a pickup truck. Maybe they like to put their bike in the back, maybe they like to put some gardening supplies or anything, but it's pretty common for normal people, everyday people to have a pickup truck.
This is a minivan. It's what I have. This is usually 100% only for families.
All of the marketing, all of the features are for families who have kids, especially young kids, but it's helpful for any age of kids. There's a lot of space, the doors slide open, as I'll show you in just a little bit, so your kid doesn't open the door and hit someone else's car.
There's just a lot of good features for families. This is an SUV. Those letters stand for sports utility vehicle. A lot of people do not use this for sports. All of the advertisements show these big cars going off road into the mud and doing some kind of adventure, but the majority of people don't do that with these kinds of cars. They just like having a big car. It's safer. I've been thinking about this, because in the US, a lot of people have big cars. I have a minivan.