Because it's a very quick and easy way to paint a mental picture.

Because it's relevant. The kind of car that hits somebody makes a big difference.

Same reason they use surnames. For clarity.

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.

Not quite so. The media also insists on doing this with guns, while cramming in as many irrelevant descriptions and scare-words as possible.

Do they always do that?

I just looked through recent articles on vehicle-related incidents on a major local news website for my city, and that doesn't seem to be the case at least there.

• https://wien.orf.at/stories/3376060/ doesn't mention it, though it does have a photo of the car in question
• https://wien.orf.at/stories/3375812/ isn't directly about a car crash, but is about someone getting assaulted over vehicle-related behavior; doesn't mention the car model
• https://wien.orf.at/stories/3375778/ doesn't mention it

I was unable to quickly find a recent story on that site that does mention it, so your premise doesn't seem to be exactly true; maybe it's true where you live, but not everywhere in the world.

would you rather get hit by a Miata or a Ram?

This is entirely speculation on my part.

News articles on automobile collisions usually come from the initial police investigation reports. At least in the USA, such reports capture the bare minimum of details that the police are required to collect, such as the age of the motorists and victims involved, rough property damage estimates, and the vehicles involved.

Although it's true that different jurisdictions might require this information in different formats, certain fields are mandatory to report to the national agency on highway safety, in order to identify trends that point to a class-wide issue. For example, without adequate data, it would be hard to correlate a rare condition where a particular model of car malfunctions on the highway, making it much harder to start a recall of said automobile.

As a result, what the police collect first will guarantee that they meet their reporting obligation. And since that report forms the basis of what journalists then -- IMO, lazily -- copy into an article and editors slap a clickbait title on it, that's what ends up being the de facto format for such news articles.

In the USA, this results in the absurd situation where even in an article about malicious collisions by a motorist into a bicyclist, the article will dutifully report that the motorist was wearing a seat belt and the bicyclist was wearing a helmet... As if somehow either seat belts or helmets would have changed the outcome of an assault.

Well, he didn’t hit her with this, did he? https://www.otto.de/p/rolektro-elektromobil-rolektro-maximus-mx4-6-700-w-6-km-h-1943289422/