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You've heard of people who look like their pets, but how about people who look like their cars?

According to a study our faces can bear a striking resemblance to the front of our vehicles.

And this apparently means that our pets, in turn, also look like our cars.

Researchers at University of Vienna say cars look like their owners (stock image shown). They found people could associate owners with the front of their vehicles. This follows similar research that says people perceive faces in the front of vehicles - known as pareidolia

The study was undertaken by University of Vienna psychologists Stefan Stiegar and Martin Voracek, reports Scientific American.

In the research they found that, when looked at from the front, cars seemed to resemble their owners.

This follows similar research that says people perceive faces in the front of vehicles - known as pareidolia.

'The initial idea was born as I was reading the article about "dogs do resemble their owners,"' Stiegar tells MailOnline.

'I thought, this could also replicate when using cars instead of dogs. This was some sort of everyday hypothesis because I frequently found that cars, to some extent, resemble their owners.'

In the study they rook 30 black and white photos of car owners and the front of their cars.

One prerequisite though was that the owners had not been given the car as a gift, but had bought it for themselves.

They then placed the real owner among images of several others who didn't own the car, and they asked 160 participants to identify who was most likely to own the car on a scale of one to six (most to least likely).

They found that people would assign particular traits to people and, more often than not, guessed correctly.

'The real owner was in fact assigned rank 1 most frequently and rank 6 least frequently,' the researchers write.

However, they add that sex and age were not considered important factors, with the face being the main indicator.

Think Katie Price (left) looks like the pink Jeep she sold recently (right)? The study involved asking volunteers to look at a selection of peopleOne was the owner and the rest were not, with the volunteers selecting the right person more often than other options

Spoiler alert: One of the people here is the correct owner, while the other five are incorrect. Why not have a go at guessing who the right person is before you read more of this caption, as we'll reveal the answer at the end. If you guessed the man in the top left, you'd be correct

They proved this by repeating the test for volunteers but showing them the side or back of the car instead.

This time they were much less accurate in their guesses, suggesting that the appearance of the front of the car as compared to faces was the most important factor.

The results of the study suggest that people are buying cars that look like themselves.

And in a further study, the psychologists repeated the research with dogs - and found the same results when they viewed cars from the fronts.

There was one stipulation, however - they could only achieve this feat for purebeed dogs, and not mixed breeds.

Of the overall research Stiegar said: 'I was surprised, indeed.

'This was the reason why we replicated it further two times. But what surprised me most was that the effect basically remained after controlling for possible stereotypes.'

This graph shows how a score of 1, most likely to own the car, was selected for the real owner more often than other options. The research goes on to say that dogs also look like their owner's car. The researchers ruled out other facts that might have influenced the study