The Blog
Deep dives into badge design, brand history and the data behind the world's vehicle marques.
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19 min readHorses, Bulls, Lions and Snakes: The Animals Hiding in Car Badges
Every animal on a car badge is an argument — about speed, power, venom or endurance. Here is where each one came from, and why new brands no longer use them.
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23 min readBritish Car Brands: 65 Marques and What Happened to Them
Britain once had more car makers than any country outside America. Almost none are British-owned today. Here is how that happened, marque by marque.
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22 min readShields, Circles and Ovals: The Hidden Geometry of Car Badges
Car logos cluster into a handful of shapes for reasons of heraldry, casting tooling and grille geometry. Here is what each silhouette signals.
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22 min readChinese Car Brands Explained: Who Owns Whom
SAIC, Geely, BYD, Chery, NIO, Xiaomi, Huawei — a guide to the ownership map behind the world's most crowded car market and its badges.
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25 min readEvery Dead American Car Brand and Why It Died
A brand-by-brand autopsy of the American marques that no longer exist, from Duesenberg and Packard to Pontiac, Mercury and the SPAC-era EV startups.
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26 min readThe Electric Car Startups That Failed (And Why)
Fisker, Nikola, Lordstown, Byton, Canoo, Arrival and a dozen more died building electric cars. Here is what actually killed them — and what the survivors had.
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22 min readThe Prancing Horse and the Raging Bull: Ferrari vs Lamborghini
A tractor magnate, a wartime flying ace and one very famous clutch — how two badges from the same corner of Italy came to define the supercar.
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24 min readThe Great Flattening: Why Every Car Brand Redesigned Its Logo Between 2018 and 2022
Chrome, bevels and drop shadows vanished from car badges in barely four years. The reasons were screens, radar, regulation and money — not taste.
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23 min readThe Complete Evolution of the Ford Logo, 1903 to Today
From an art-nouveau roundel to a flat blue oval — how Ford's badge changed across twelve decades, and the printing, business and screen pressures behind every redesign.
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22 min readEvery Car Manufacturer That Has Competed in Formula 1
Seventy-five years of car makers entering Formula 1, spending fortunes, occasionally winning, and quietly walking away — and why the cycle keeps repeating.
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25 min readGerman Car Brands: The Complete Guide
Every German marque that matters — the big four, the tuners, the DDR survivors and the lost names — with the badge history and engineering culture behind each.
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24 min readHarley-Davidson: 120 Years of the Bar and Shield
From a Milwaukee backyard shed to the most licensed logo in motorcycling — the full story of Harley-Davidson, its 45-degree V-twin, and the badge that outlived every crisis.
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25 min readThe Hidden Meanings in 30 Famous Car Logos
What car badges actually mean, from Toyota's overlapping hearts to Bentley's mismatched feathers, and which beloved origin stories are demonstrably false.
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21 min readHow Toyota Became the World's Largest Automaker
From a wooden loom in rural Japan to 10 million cars a year — the inventions, near-bankruptcies and stubborn ideas behind Toyota's rise.
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23 min readJapanese Car Brands: The Complete Guide
Every Japanese marque, luxury division, forgotten bubble-era channel and tuning house — and the story of how Japan went from licensing Austins to setting the standard.
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21 min readMercedes-Benz: From the Patent-Motorwagen to the EQS
How two rival German workshops invented the automobile, took a customer's daughter's name, and spent 140 years defining what a car should be.
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25 min readThe Oldest Car Brands Still Building Cars Today
A countdown of the survivors — from Peugeot's coffee grinders to Opel's sewing machines — and why the "oldest carmaker" question has no single honest answer.
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28 min readTyre Logos: Motoring's Most Overlooked Design Category
From Bibendum to the winged foot, the horse of Hannover to MRF's muscleman — how tyre makers built famous logos for a product nobody wants to look at.
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24 min readThe Beetle and the Brand It Built: A Complete History of Volkswagen
How a rear-engined economy car ordered by a dictatorship, revived by a British Army officer, and sold to America by ad men built the world's second-largest car group.
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19 min readWhy So Many Car Logos Are Blue (And What Every Colour Really Means)
Blue dominates car badges for reasons that are half psychology, half accident of history. A deep dive into automotive colour, from rosso corsa to flat monochrome.
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