#badges

Now that Stellantis owns Citroën, there's a chance North America may see automobiles wearing French badges populating its streets once again. However, the corporate emblem may look a little different from the one you remember – assuming you're old enough to recall seeing them before the company pulled out of the market in 1974.

With supply constraints persisting within the automotive industry, the knowledge that a manufacturer has induced a production stall due to a lack of parts is hardly big news. Nobody seems able to source enough batteries and the semiconductor shortage has left automakers dealing with routine factory shutdowns. But Ford seems to be confronting one of the saddest examples we’ve yet seen and has confirmed that it’s delaying trucks – seemingly because it doesn’t have enough trim badging or Blue Ovals to go around.

While Lotus Cars’ world premiere of the Evija hypercar was easily the biggest announcement made by the company in the past ten years, another major announcement slipped in beneath the radar this week. Apparently, Lotus has a new logo.

Whilst browsing the brand’s latest press releases, we noticed it had uploaded some new photos of the Evija and a gaggle of snapshots from its new partnership with the Norwich City Football Club. Despite European soccer sponsorships holding this author’s interest about as well as a sieve holds water, something looked a little off about the Lotus emblem emblazoned on the Evora and Exige models parked outside of the renamed “Lotus Training Centre.”

Why Lotus decided to bury its new branding announcement deep within a press release about its favorite sports club is anybody’s guess. Perhaps it felt the changes to the logo weren’t extreme enough to warrant a separate announcement.

Apparently, the 2017 Ram 1500 Lone Star Silver Edition was such a hit at the State Fair of Texas, visitors stole the badge off of both trucks.

Located in a lower corner of the truck’s chrome mesh grille, the badge lets everyone know that this isn’t just any other Ram model. Texas-sized amounts of polished metal and chrome are other giveaways.

Unfortunately for Ram representatives at the fair, those badges walked away as milled aluminum bling, possibly bound for a hat, vest or belt.

Last week I offered you, the man or woman in the street, a chance to own a “TEXAS EDITION” badge at my expense. I asked you to tell me what you’d do with such a badge. After an exhaustive selection process consisting of me having a couple shots of Ketel One Citroen and picking shit at random, I’ve come up with the “winners.” I’ll be contacting each one of you via email in the next week. If the email address associated with your username is no longer valid, now would be a good time to update it or to contact us via the various links to the right of this page.

I’d like to thank all of you who came up with ideas. Unfortunately for you, some of those ideas sucked and frankly I’m insulted that you’d even think that I’d give you a $2.87 badge for something as stupid as that. You must think I’m rich enough not to care just because I own four PRS Private Stock guitars and a bunch of motorcycles and rare books and stuff, when in fact those are the very reasons that I am not rich enough to not care.

Enough about the losers. As they say, winners aren’t losers. So let’s get to the winners.

Want to know why Mercedes, Audi, Lexus and all of the other luxury players are doing so well these days? Because of less-costly, lower-end luxury models.

Francisco writes:

Dear Sajeev,

Regular reader here. To the matter at hand:

On a recent visit to Mexico, this Mariner was in front of me begging for a bad cellphone pic. Don’t get me wrong, after-market badge-upgraded cars are pretty common there, but this already badge-engineered Ford Explorer (Mercury Mariner – SM) badge-engineered once more to a “Lincoln Mariner 4wd V6” was too ironic to let go. Please note the extra Lincoln badge thrown in for good measure on the dealer license plate cover. Make no mistake, it is a Lincoln.

I assumed that this would bring a smile and a chuckle to an ardent Ford guy like yourself. Hope you enjoy it and keep up the good work!

Best regards from Sweden,
Francisco