The Jaguar Building

Scenario

You are given a single street-level photograph. The image contains no metadata, no caption, and no additional context.

At first glance, the image appears ordinary, but it contains enough visual clues to identify a specific commercial location.

Starting Material

Challenge Objective

Your task is to identify the shop shown in the image

Solution

I started by using Google Lens to see what I could find. I found an Instagram post which clearly says it’s the Cartier building in London.

The Mystery Car

Scenario

Following the identification of a storefront, attention shifts to the surrounding environment.

Historical imagery of the same location reveals additional elements that were not present in the original photograph.

Starting Material

• Known shop location from previous challenge

Challenge Objective

Using street-level imagery from January 2017, identify the custom 4-character registration plate of a vehicle parked opposite the shop.

Solution

For this one, I over‑complicated things a bit.

I started with Google Earth, went to the Cartier store on New Bond Street, and began looking around. I tried the timeline but couldn’t find any imagery for January 2017 – I was seeing captures from March and other months, but nothing from January. I walked up and down the street in Earth to see if any other spots exposed that date and still got nowhere.

On top of that, Google Earth was blurring the car registrations, which made me think I probably couldn’t use Google at all for this challenge. I started looking at other map tools and alternatives, but didn’t find anything that obviously helped.

At that point, I went back and re‑read the challenge text and noticed it just said “street‑level imagery”, not specifically Google Earth. That’s when it clicked that I hadn’t actually tried Google Maps yet.

So I switched to Google Maps, navigated back to the Cartier store, and dropped into Street View. This time, the date slider did have an option for January 2017. I selected that, then rotated the view around to look at the buildings opposite Cartier.

Parked at the kerb on that side was the car in question. In Google Maps (unlike Earth in my tests), the plate in this frame wasn’t blurred. I zoomed in until it was readable and got a 4‑character custom plate I used that plate as the flag for this challenge.

Vehicle Attribution

Scenario

The vehicle observed in earlier imagery displays distinctive design features.

Combined with its registration plate, these details enable deeper identification using open-source data.

Starting Material

• Vehicle registration plate
• Visual reference from street imagery

Challenge Objective

Determine the make and model year of the vehicle.

Solution

I’m not a car guy, but this immediately looked like a Bentley. To get a more specific lead, I cropped the car and ran it through an AI image tool to see which model it thought it might be. It came back with Bentley Continental R, mid‑1990s.

With that hint in mind, I wanted something more concrete than just “AI says so”, so I took the plate and put it into a public UK vehicle‑info site. The result for that registration came back as:

• Make: Bentley

• Model: Continental R

• Year of manufacture: 1995

UKCARDATA

That lined up with both the Street View visuals and the AI guess, so I was confident enough to use bentley_1995 as the flag.

Looking Back

Scenario

Archived online material references the same vehicle several years earlier.

In April 2008, the car had a significant technical issue.

Starting Material

• Vehicle identified in the previous challenge

Challenge Objective

Identify which component of the vehicle was affected during the April 2008 incident.

Solution

The site I used for the last challenge turned out to have the answer for this one as well. I went back to the same UK vehicle‑info page UKCARDATA.

On this page, there’s an MOT history section, so I scrolled down and looked for any tests around April 2008. There is an entry on 11 April 2008 showing a FAIL, followed by a later PASS that same day.

I opened the detailed notes for that MOT test. The list starts with:

Nearside Headlamp not working on dipped beam (1.7.5a)

Based on that, the flag for this challenge was headlamp.