did you ever figure out a way to do this for your thousands of images?
You might try Mathematica's ImageAlign feature, they have a 2 week trial. Hobbyist license isn't terribly expensive, wish their biz license had a tier for small biz that have yet to even profit
For your example (assuming all your pictures are cars) I'd create a new image by erasing everything but the wheels on the car, then align each of the thousands to that template. Their function finds the corresponding points automatically.