If I'm not mistaken, in the car world they've adopted a standard of "at least 20 years old" for "vintage". I think others have adopted the same standard for their fields of collecting.
"Antique" would be a little tougher to define - suffice it to say that it would be something older than vintage. I might peg the standard personally at "at least 50 years old".
Think about it - while they aren't as great as some of the older cards, you could consider any car model year 1993 or older (since models came out a year BEFORE the actual year they were labeled at the time) as vintage. There's very few of them on the road. Though if the car was in craptacular condition, then it wouldn't be so much vintage as junk and spare parts.
Cars from the '80s and '70s would certainly be vintage. They existed during your lifetime if you're not a little past middle-aged. '60s-era cars would mostly be thought of as vintage. But if you go back to models from 1962 and older, well - relatively few people alive actually drove one, and only a handful more than that were alive when they came into dealer's showrooms for the first time. That's something I'd consider antique - it's not just old, but it uses technology that is the same as what we use today only on the most basic level (they're all combustion engines running on either gasoline or diesel fuel). Beyond that, anything that was "cutting edge" back then we'd think of as either "quaint" and/or "no longer meeting current safety standards". Those cars would certainly be antiques.
One could argue that the description would cover many cars going as close to today as the 1980s, but if you looked at the highest-end vehicles of that time, many of their most expensive technology-related optional features (not counting true luxuries like leather seats, wood paneling, etc.) would appear as standard equipment in today's economy cars, things like airbags, digital radios and clocks, electronically-controlled cylinder firing instead of an alternator and so on. Of course, the older the car, even if it's still "vintage", the fewer of those features it would have, until you reached back to the "antique" cars, which is why the definition in terms of years is a little fuzzier. But going back to the 50s, you didn't even have FM-band radios - the technology for using frequency modulation instead of only amplitude modulation wasn't in use at the time. Those cars had not an ounce of plastic in them - all the "shiny bits" were made of chromed metal, not chrome-painted plastic. Body construction was completely steel and the cars weighed about one to one-point-five tons more than today's vehicles, if not more.
I think that as far as this relates to playing cards, you'd need to know from one of the leading authorities. I'll go dig up Tom or Judy Dawson's email address and fire off a note, see what they say and get back here with the response. Lee Asher might also have a good response - if I don't hear from the Dawsons, that's plan B.
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