The Plood, The Goooste, The Booogt, And More Amazing, Confusing Automotive Emblems

As an Autopian, you probably get asked questions about cars on a daily basis. A common query I get is after-the-fact car identification from people hoping I can tell them what kind of car was in front of them at a light.

“I’ve never seen one before” they’ll say. “It was this sort of sporty-looking thing with a strange badge on it.” That gives me basically nothing to work off of so I ask if they had any idea at all what the logo might have said. “We’ll, I think it was called an ex-ra-tee?”

An Exraty. An Exraty? Damn, that’s a new one. It’s nearly unheard of for me to encounter a mark from the last 100 years I’ve never heard of at all. Can you describe it a bit more, I ask. “Well, it had two wings on the back like a biplane.” Whoa, that’s odd. Could this Exraty be some bespoke coachbuilder, perhaps outside Tuscany, where artisans are inspired by World War II aircraft to create cars that … wait a minute.

I quickly tap a search into my phone, select Images, and present my likely suspect. Is this the car you saw?

“That’s it!”

Nope, not Italian. The Exraty is a Merkur XR4Ti, or the Americanized version of the Ford Sierra XR4. No wonder this thing didn’t stand a chance in this market.

We laugh, but that’s an odd mouthful of a name for a car and easy to see how someone might read it wrong in that stylized font. “Surely that’s an A between the R and T, why would it be a four?” They aren’t alone.

My Rental Car Is A What?

Typography is a tricky thing. It can be done extremely well where the eye is fooled into reading exactly what the designer wants you to see, even if technically it’s not actually there. Take a look at the Studebaker Lark badge below. The letters are all connected by a horizontal chrome band at the bottom. Other emblems have used similar connecting material between letters, but you’re not supposed to read it as anything other than masybe an underline. So you might expect to read this basdge as “Iark” since that thing in the front might be a capital “I,” but the only thing anyone I’ve encountered reads it as is Lark, without an annoying space between the “L” and the other letters. It’s rather brilliant.

American Motors was famous for using straight-up Helvetica font for most of the graphics on their cars and, more famously, on Jeep products. It created a recognizable style for the Kenosha Kar Krafters, and it was also tremendously legible:

Other badges, well … they have occasionally not read as well as the makers likely intended. As car people, we typically know what the make and model the thing is since we’ve already seen it on a website or in a magazine for older machines, so we don’t have misread-emblem issues. You would never, for example, call a Toyota MR2 a “Mister Two.” [Ed Note: I would, and do – Pete]

But if you have no automotive inclination whatsoever, you might be forgiven for misreading certain emblems. There are plenty of examples of badges that graphic designers possibly should have taken a second look at before they tooled up to make tens of thousands of them.

They Should Have Gone Back To Fancy Cursive Shit

It might sound hard to believe, but I’ve personally heard accounts of all of these misreads of badges below. Honestly, I probably can’t blame the readers of these emblems.

Pontiac really got into the Halloween spirit in the eighties, offering not only the GOOOLE (I usually hear it pronounced GOOH-lee) but also the GOOOSTE to scare the kids. Nobody has asked me what a Pontiac “GOO-lay” was, but to name a car after the guy whose appearance on TV caused Elvis to shoot the screen might be worth it.

We all know that Tesla offers a PLAID model, but at some point they sold a PLOOD version as well. Was that ultra slow or something?

If there was ever a more appropriate badge than 74 Oil I don’t know what it is. Finally, a car that is honest about how many quarts of synthetic it will burn up a month (the early V8s were terrible).

I wouldn’t mind being Stealth, but it would be so much better to be BOOOGT, wouldn’t it? Not a GOOOSTE, but close:

Displacement is usually noted in cubic inches or liters, so I’m not sure how large the motor is in the Datsun 24 ounce:

We can ignore the Ford Fiso (pronounced FI-sow), the French-sounding Toyota Le Hybrid and even De Coupe by dem guys at dat dere Mitsubishi n’at.

Let’s Eat Grandma / Let’s Eat, Grandma

What’s the issue here? In many cases it’s the typography being too similar. There are no breaks between letters and other times the numbers and letters look identical (like the zeros and “O”s in the 6000 LE and 3000 GT).

A little change in scale can help. For example, there is no reason why you couldn’t scale down the “TI” in XR4Ti and have a much more readable badge. See the one I modified below:

Oddly enough, Acura has done just that with there SH-AWD logo for “Super Handling All-Wheel Drive.” You can see the difference in the sizing of the SH versus the AWD on the lower one. Oddly enough, I don’t think the one replaced the other one on Acura vehicles. Yes, I have been asked about what a SHAWD is.

Different fonts might work as well, or different colors or finishes. A few small changes would go a long way to making an easy-to-misread badge (I’m looking at you, KN Motors!) into something quite legible.

Still, where would the fun be in that? Don’t you want to hear your mom ask what a Volvo Jurbo is?

Isn’t “Jurbo” the main guy in Breakin? I’m not really sure, but can you think of any more badge fails?

Top graphic: Thisss is a Mitsubishi 3000GT (not a BOOOGT) via Cars and Bids