Simply typing in terms in the search bar at the top will provide a list of results that match that search. It is not case-sensitive (in other words, uppercase or lowercase don't change the results at all). Diacritics are resolved to the closest Latin characters, so coupé and coupe will return exactly the same results.
You are able to search on very basic information like the manufacturer name (eg Dodge, Ford, Chevrolet and so on), the model name (Avenger, Superfast, Aventador, Chiron, etc).
Terms can be ORed with the pipe (|) operator. If you wanted to find Ferrari Coupés and Ferrari Cabriolets in one search, adding the | operator between the bodystyles would return all matches that included either Ferrari coupés or cabriolets. Or perhaps you wanted to find all 2.0 and 2.4 litre Fiats, you could use the | operator between the 2.0 and 2.4 terms: Fiats of 2.0 and 2.4 litre capacity.
You can use this operator on any sort of term as well - for example if you wanted all BMW E30, E36 and E46 models, you could OR the 3 model terms (e30|e36|e46).
Drivetrain: Terms can be added to match the drivetrain type (electric, hybrid, petrol, diesel), the aspiration (turbocharged, supercharged, naturally aspirated) and the body type (saloon/sedan, coupé, cabriolet, SUV, etc). So, for example, a search for the terms turbo petrol bmw coupe will show all turbocharged petrol BMW coupés in the database.
Engine capacity: Another good search narrowing technique is to add the capacity of the internal combustion engine of the model you're searching for into the terms. For instance, 1.6 will restrict the results to 1.6 litre engines (or cars that have 1.6 in their model name). This rounds the cubic centimetre capacity to the nearest 100cc, so 1.6 means 1550cc - 1649cc, 2.0 means 1950cc - 2049cc, and so on. It also works with cubic inches, so you could search for chevrolet 427 and find all Chevrolets with 427 cubic inch engines. This is rounded to the nearest cubic inch.
Model code: Some models are very easily identified by their model series code - think BMW E30, Mercedes-Benz R 129, Toyota AE86. You can add those codes to the search to further narrow your results to the appropriate model series.
Years between: Use the full years for the start and end year and separate them with only a - (hyphen) and the results will be limited to the years specified. For example, searching for the terms lancia|bmw saloon|coupe|cabriolet 1996-1998 will show you all Lancia and BMWs with body styles of saloon, coupé or cabriolet from 1996 to 1998, inclusive.
Say you are looking for cars that matched certain terms, but did not contain other terms - perhaps all Maseratis, but not models with automatic gearboxes. You can negate the automatic gearbox by removing results that match the automatic term by negating it, using the tilde (~) operator in front of the term you want to exclude. In our contrived example, that would be maserati ~automatic.
Sometimes you want to keep related terms as a single phrase even if they are two (or more) distinct words, for example De Tomaso. Maybe you wanted to list all GR Corollas, but when the terms are not treated as a phrase you are overwhelmed by the number of Corolla entries in the database. You could, for these examples, put the phrase in double quotes: "de tomaso" and "gr corolla".