Badges of honour: the 10 best car badges of all time

Arresting crests from motoring history

What’s in a badge? Prestige? Shiny enamel? Or just a heap of marketing trickery?

Whatever’s the case, the humble badge is the one thing that binds every vehicle in a marque’s garage. How else would the Aston Martin Cygnet be related to the DB4?

And, in an era of constant badge engineering (where one machine is taken by multiple makes, rebadged, renamed and upsold as an entirely different car), we ought to treasure the crests featured here, which have stood the test of time as prestigious and storied symbols of motoring heritage – or are just plain strange enough to stand out from the crowd.

Either way, here are the 10 best car badges ever.

10. Mitsubishi

Yataro Iwasaki founded shipping line Tsukumo Shokai in 1870. The three-diamond mark was chosen in deference to the powerful Tosa clan, Iwasaki’s mentors, because it signified the three oak leaves of their crest and the three stacked diamonds of his family’s.

10. Mitsubishi (continued)

In 1874, that firm became Mitsubishi Shokai. It diversified into scooters in 1946 and economy cars 14 years later – though when Mitsubishis came to the UK in ’75, they were sold as Colts because the real name was deemed too ‘foreign’ for British ears.

9. Chevrolet

William Durant, one of the architects of General Motors, is said to have noticed the ‘bow tie’ shape in the wallpaper pattern of a Paris hotel, torn off a strip and kept it for reference. In ’73, his wife claimed that her husband had plagiarised it, probably from a trademark for Coalette firelighters that he’d seen in an advert.

9. Chevrolet (cont.)

Either way, Durant definitely turned it into Chevy’s emblem: his daughter Margery said she saw him draw it at dinner “between the soup and the fried chicken”. By the ’70s, the logo had been replaced by range-specific liveries, and its reinstatement only began with the 1980 Citation.

8. Lotus

When Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman founded Lotus in ’55, he decided every model would carry his initials, neatly melded into a monogram. In ’83, with Chapman dead and disgraced, a naff replacement appeared – before uproar from customers quickly had the ‘ACBC’ restored. 

8. Lotus (cont.)

The first black-on-chrome badges went on a one-off Elan for sales director Graham Arnold in ’67. A year later, black badges were placed on all new cars made in the month after the death of Jim Clark.

7. Lamborghini

One of the least tampered-with badges, the hoof-scraping, ready-to-charge fighting bull first adorned Lamborghini's 350GT in ’62 – and survives in almost identical form today.

7. Lamborghini (cont.)

In fact, the badge existed before any of the cars: Taurean Ferruccio Lamborghini had used it on his tractors since the early 1950s. Though we'd suggest that it looks better on a Countach such as the one pictured here.

6. Aston Martin

Outspread birds’ wings portray unfettered, soaring speed: suitable for everything from the first Hispano-Suiza in 1908 to the Mini Cooper a century later.

But Aston steered away from plumage in 1932 when its badge was reworked by The Autocar’s Sammy Davis. Obsessed with Egyptology, he engraved the legend over the shape of a flying scarab beetle.

6. Aston Martin (cont.)

Modest new owner David Brown reinstated feathered status in ’47, mainly to accommodate his own name.

5. Ford

Henry's right-hand man Childe Harold Wills knocked up the curly Ford script on an old printing press in his attic – a contraption he used as a teenager to earn pin money by selling visiting cards.

It appeared on a car in 1904, but the first Ford with the familiar blue ‘script-in-oval’ was the 1927 Model A.

5. Ford (cont.)

Despite its impact, it had all but vanished by ’47 and it wasn’t until the ’80s that every US Ford routinely sported it.

4. Ghia

No Italian coachbuilder has had its name more used and abused than Carrozzeria Ghia. Founded in 1919 by Giacinto Ghia, cars with the company’s coachwork came to carry his signature in chrome, in a diagonal blue band across a red shield.

4. Ghia (cont.)

VW’s Karmann-Ghia sent Giacinto’s legacy global, sporting an outsized rendering of his scrawl, and the manufacturer tried to claim exclusive rights to the badge when Ford bought Ghia in 1973 – but it was fruitless: a tarted-up Mustang II carrying Ghia badges emerged shortly after.

3. Renault

Some sort of diamond-shaped emblem has fronted every Renault since 1925, at first with the name set across a slatted centre section which was, initially, no more than an outlet for the car’s novel electric horn.

3. Renault (cont.)

The 4CV wore the badge on a fake, triple-chrome-bar grille (it was rear-engined), while the diamond was often applied in an unusual offset place on top-sellers such as the R4.

2. Lancia

Vincenzo Lancia employed his pal Count Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia to design a badge for his cars. He came up with a dark blue flag bearing the name hung to the left on a lance – a pun on Vincenzo’s surname. This emblem was superimposed over the outline of a four-spoke steering wheel featuring, on one spoke, the hand throttle.

2. Lancia (cont.)

With the Flaminia in ’57, the steering wheel was dropped and the name, shield and lance became a bold chrome stencil on the radiator grille.

1. Wolseley

Wolseley isn’t remembered for all that much, but it has one major innovation to its fusty name: it was the first and (so far) only marque to feature an illuminated badge: the ghost light, which was given to every model in its 1932 range.

1. Wolseley (cont.)

A tiny bulb was automatically switched on with the headlights, providing a warm glow behind the name in crimson on a cream screen background. The ’76 Six, the last of the line, still had its glow-in-the-dark identifier.