GAs are a good bit above brute forcing. Brute forcing this would be enumerating ever possible car and testing them all.

Brute force doesn't necessarily mean testing in a dumb way (testing all options).

If you try to crack a password with a wordlist, would you do it randomly, or would you order by word frequency? The later is smarter, but it's still brute forcing (resource/time intensive).

It's a bit smarter still than that though. Brute force still covers the whole space. GAs are far closer to a hill climbing search which I don't think qualifies as anything near a brute force search.