The URL structure is usually mirrored on the actual website by way of clickable breadcrumbs or as navigational information architecture.
People understand slashes indicate folders and directories, even though database-driven CMSes do not use folder structures. They can figure out that they can go one level from from "example.com/cars/toyota" by removing the "/toyota"
I don’t agree with the breadcrumb mirroring. It’s orthogonal. You can have breadcrumb or not and it wouldn’t matter to the user if it mirrors the url or not.
