Best way to group my products?

I'm trying to determine the best way to group products based on various categories. I'm wondering if using different categories is the best way, or if I should use some kind of attribute in conjunction with categories.

For example, we're selling automotive accessories. So our current categories are:

Bumpers
Exhaust
Wheels
Tires
Etc...

For certain products, I want to group them by the car Make/Model. Some products are generic enough where they don't apply to any Make/Model (say like windshield washer fluid).

So for a bumper, I want it to come up under Bumpers and say Honda/Civic.

Are different product categories the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance!

I would create the bumpers category with all the bumpers in it. Then, I'd create a category of something like Bumpers by Make with a sub-cat of Honda and possibly a sub-cat of Civic with a product of it's bumper. You can use the copy icon to the right of the bumper to LINK the original bumper to wherever you want. Unless you have some strange attributes with the bumper, you'd want to copy the attributes when you LINK the item. If the bumper fits more than one model, use the Multiple Categories Link Manager to add the bumper to several models.

Linking leaves only one item (the bumper in the bumper cat) to edit, re-price, etc and all will be changed. Copying makes a new product that is separate of its original.

It's best to get all the main items loaded and then start adding categories to link them to. Otherwise you'll probably miss one or two by forgetting which ones were done and which weren't.