Oncoming Automobile Emoji

A car viewed from the front, headlights pointed toward you, in red or blue depending on the platform. 🚘 is the "oncoming" half of a matched pair with 🚗. Same vehicle, different camera angle. Apple, Samsung, and WhatsApp show it as a red sedan. Google and Microsoft show it as blue.

It's one of a handful of emojis that exists purely to indicate direction. Unicode added four "oncoming" vehicle emojis in 6.0, 🚘 oncoming automobile, 🚍 oncoming bus, 🚖 oncoming taxi, and 🚔 oncoming police car, all inherited from the early Japanese DoCoMo and SoftBank emoji sets. In context, the "oncoming" framing is supposed to mean "arriving," while the side-view version means "traveling" or "leaving."

In practice, nobody uses them that way. Research on emoji search volume shows 🚗 gets roughly 5x the monthly searches of 🚘, and the side-view sedan is what people default to for anything car-related. 🚘 is a niche tool: reach for it when you specifically want the "I'm pulling up right now" vibe, or when you need to show a car approaching rather than leaving. Otherwise, 🚗 is fine.

🚘 has a clear, narrow job: signaling arrival. "Outside 🚘" or "pulling up 🚘" communicates that the person is at the curb, now, front of the car facing the building. On TikTok, the "POV: he pulls up 🚘" format uses the front-facing angle deliberately, you're seeing the car from the passenger's perspective. It's a cinematic choice that 🚗 (which always shows the car leaving) can't make.

It also gets used in driver's license celebrations, because the front-facing shot mirrors the head-on photo people post with the license in hand. New drivers post "Got it! 🚘🎉" when they pass their test. Car dealerships and sales posts use 🚘 for the same reason, the front of a car is what you show off in a listing photo.

On some platforms the emoji looks nearly identical to 🚗 at small sizes, which is probably why it stayed niche. If you're texting on an iPhone, you can barely tell them apart in the compose row. The distinction is clearer on Android and Samsung, where the front-facing perspective is more obvious.

Japanese carriers invented the "oncoming" framing. NTT DoCoMo and SoftBank shipped both "automobile" and "oncoming automobile" glyphs in their late-1990s emoji sets, partly because i-mode emoji were small enough (12x12 pixels) that the front view conveyed different information than the side view. You could actually read headlights, a windshield, and a grille, things a side-view car at that size couldn't show.

When Unicode 6.0 encoded the character in 2010 as U+1F698, it kept the matched-pair logic. Modern platforms render emojis at much higher resolution, where the distinction matters less, but Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all kept their oncoming-automobile designs as front-facing sedans to preserve the original semantic.

The "oncoming" set never really caught on in English-speaking cultures. Japanese has linguistic structures that make directional emoji useful, verbs specifying direction of approach, while English speakers mostly just want "car." That's why 🚗 wins and 🚘 lives in the shadow.

1. 1997Front-facing car glyphs appear in Japanese carrier emoji sets (DoCoMo, J-Phone/SoftBank)↗
2. 2010Encoded in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F698 ONCOMING AUTOMOBILE
3. 2012First ships on Apple iOS 6 and Google Android 4.3
4. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 standard↗
5. 2017Google brings the oncoming automobile into line with its red automobile redesign in Android Oreo↗

• •There are four "oncoming" vehicle emojis. Unicode 6.0 added a matched set of front-facing vehicles: 🚘 oncoming automobile, 🚍 oncoming bus, 🚖 oncoming taxi, and 🚔 oncoming police car. All four inherited from early Japanese i-mode carriers. None of them caught on outside Japan.
• •It's a different color on different platforms. Apple, Samsung, and WhatsApp render 🚘 as a red sedan. Google and Microsoft render it as blue. There is no Unicode spec for emoji color, so each vendor picked their own, and the oncoming automobile ended up in two camps.
• •The oncoming framing made sense at 12x12 pixels. Japanese i-mode phones in the late 1990s displayed emoji at roughly 12 pixels square. At that size, a front-facing car showed headlights, grille, and windshield clearly, while a side-view car was mostly a blob. The distinction was visually necessary. Modern retina displays make it almost pointless.
• •Google once drew 🚗 as blue and 🚘 as different colors. Early Android emoji showed the side-view car as silver or blue while other platforms went red. Google unified around red in the 2017 Android Oreo redesign, which is why all the car emojis look more similar across platforms today.
• •Rideshare apps probably should've used it. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash all show a car icon approaching a pin on their maps during pickup. The emoji equivalent would be 🚘, which nobody uses in those notifications. The apps use custom icons instead.