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Subclassing: Vehicles in Motion

Level: Beginner (score: 2)

In this exercise, you’ll practice creating Python subclasses and using super() to inherit from a parent class.

Subclassing allows you to build specialized versions of a general blueprint, making your code more organized and reusable.

If you're new to this concept, check out our article: How to Write a Python Subclass.

You’ll start with a Vehicle base class containing attributes common to all vehicles. From there, you’ll create two subclasses — Car and Motorbike — each adding their own unique attributes and methods. Both subclasses should still have access to all methods from Vehicle.

1. Implement the Vehicle class with brand, model, and wheels attributes, plus a description() method that returns: "<brand> <model> with <wheels> wheels", for example: "Toyota Corolla with 4 wheels".

2. Create a Car subclass with an extra doors attribute and a honk() method returning: "Beep beep!".

3. Create a Motorbike subclass with an extra engine_cc attribute and a rev_engine() method returning: "<parent class's description method> goes Vroom vroom!", for example: "Yamaha R3 with 2 wheels goes Vroom vroom!"

4. Use super() in each subclass’s constructor to initialize the shared attributes.

💡 Tip: In real-world code, you can make constructor parameters keyword-only (e.g., Motorbike(brand="Yamaha", model="R3", wheels=2, engine_cc=321)) to avoid mixing up arguments. We’re keeping them positional here for simplicity.

Related exercise: Force keyword arguments

By the end, you’ll see how inheritance lets you reuse code across multiple classes while still customizing behavior for specific cases. This is a core principle of object-oriented programming (OOP) and a powerful tool in your Python skill set.

For more OOP exercises, check out our OOP track.