With the booming social and economic development, the number of domestic and foreign motor vehicles has increased dramatically, resulting in increasing traffic flow, traffic congestion, and traffic safety problems. To better relieve traffic pressure, intelligent transportation has become the mainstream development direction and an important means of modern transportation, of which vehicle type recognition is the core component of intelligent transportation. Therefore, the research on vehicle identification is of great significance in both scientific research and real-life applications, and it is also a challenging task. Among the various detection and recognition methods, deep learning has been proved to be a more effective one, so this paper discusses the current research on deep learning and vehicle model recognition.