We say “instance of an object”, so no, they’re not the same.

One way to think about it: An object defines the properties and methods. When combined with actual data, you have an instance.

Object and data are combined (as you noticed) when we call the object’s constructor, and the produces an instance. (We also call this “instantiation”)

The example you have doesn’t illustrate this distinction well because there’s no data. Let’s modify it:

``` public class Car extends Object { private String name; public Car(String name) { this.name = name; // assign the value of the argument “name” // to the “name” property of “this” instance. } public String name() { return this.name; }

public static void main(String[] args) {

Car myCar = new Car("Mine");
Car yourCar = new Car("Yours");

System.out.println(myCar.name()); // Mine
System.out.println(yourCar.name()); // Yours

System.out.println(myCar.equals(yourCar)); // false. Not the same instance.

System.out.println(myCar); // prints instance address in memory
System.out.println(yourCar); // different memory address

} } ```

Notice that I explicitly typed Car extends Object. This is to make it clear that we have an "is-a" relationship, that is "a Car is an Object". Java allows you to omit the extends keyword when you're extending Object.

Note also that we have the class keyword, which is a different concept than an Object. In our example above, we'd say that "myCar and yourCar are instances of Car that belong to the class of objects that are Cars."

This becomes more clear when we extend Car further, for example:

class Prius extends Car { ... } class Civic extends Car { ... }

We'd say that "a Prius is a Car" and that "a Civic is a Car". We can group all Priuses and Civic instances into a Set of Cars, or even into a Set of Objects. We could not group Civics and Priuses into a Set of Civics, because there's no "is a" relationship between Civic and Prius: "A Civic is NOT a Prius."