Pulling from memory, so don't expect accurate industry terminology.

But it comes down to conveying details in a way that paints a picture with facts

If I tell you a car hits someone, what happens in your head could include anything related to a car, including an RC car. So you want details that flesh things out. It becomes a Ford hitting someone, which now lets you know it was an automobile, since Ford isn't making much in the way of anything else.

But there's all kinds of automobiles. Could be a truck, a van, a sedan, a cargo vehicle, etc. So now I tell you it was a 73 mustang. The picture is almost complete. For televised news, that's almost always the end of the description, but print journalism may well provide the color of the car, maybe some other detail to fill out the article in a way that improves the reader's ability to internalize external events.

Depending on where, some journalism degree programs teach the format as a process where you layer facts based on the space available, which is often determined by the importance of the events (which is subjective as hell, but a car hitting me isn't front page news even in my own town. But Taylor Swift being hit would be). There's a term for the craft of it all, a way to decide which bits of data to shave off as article length gets shorter, or air time decreases.

You'll see that kind of choice made in fiction too, it's just less formalized, and a writer's style is involved. Some writers give you every detail of a person's face, others may give you nothing bit hair and eye color. Some may present a description all in one place, others might scatter it through multiple pages, or even the entire length of a book. I tend to favor spreading descriptions out, and intentionally leaving out the fine details so there's room for imagination. Some stuff I've written doesn't have any description of the characters at all.

In your example, providing the make and model gives the bare minimum information to form an image in the mind, and (barring our fellow humans with aphantasia) that tends to be the best way to engage a reader.

As a tangent, there's a book titled "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk that has a main character who is a journalist, and Palahniuk uses the process of gathering details as part of his building of the character. It's a brilliant piece of craft, and worth reading for that alone.