They both have four wheels and transport atoms.

Why do you think it is helpful to be unambiguous between atoms that make up a human or atoms of any goods in the back of a truck? /s

Except that there's a true formal (in fact legal) distinction between a car and a truck (they have different emissions standards). The whole distinction between a 'transpilers' and other compilers on the other hand is 'what is the user going to do with the output'.

That's not the disinction I've seen. I like Wikipedia's:

> translates between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction

That's fairly straightforward, though a bit subjective (which doesn't preclude a word from having meaning)