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
This is wonderful! And on the exact opposite side of the misreading spectrum has been my long standing thought that the 2015era Civic badge looks like it say C4/IC
https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/gallery_slide/public/honda-civic-badge.jpg?itok=XqP4oHfN
Someone clearly misread “CIVIC” as “C-Roman Numeral 4-IC” and wanted to translate it for modern readers.
I drove a 1997 SAAB goose turbo convertible for 5 years, knew 9 was confused with g, hadn’t come across 6 being read as G
Lots of Nissans have “SL-AWD” badges. I always wonder what sort of salad a nissan SLAWD is.
Short for “SLAWD help me there’s an Altima in the next lane”
I think TACOMA is shorthand for TACO COMA. There are worse ways to go.
Or a utility knife makes for Taco
https://i.imgur.com/RLB8REc.jpeg
The heart wants what the heart wants.
I guess my old Vue was an X RAWD. XR AWD
Also, does anyone remember WhiteGMC trucks? Since there was no space between “White” and “GMC” and it was in all caps, I could never figure out if the pronunciation was “White GMC” or “whit-eg-emk”.
The VW Rabbit pickup had a SPORTRUCK model with a huge logo on the side. Was it a SPORE truck? Or a SPORT ruck?
Is it Pet / Smart, or Pets / Mart?
Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
Since you asked…used to be PetsMART, then years ago they spent millions rebranding/changing signs to PetSMART (Smart about pets)
My wife used to work there
It’s just StupidPet.
A(n overlooked and underappreciated) ’90s Seattle band (occasionally featured in part in Almost Live’s headbanging “Lame List”) had a great name that had a third level: Gruntruck could be Grunt Ruck or Grun Truck, but also sounded like “Grunge Rock” at a time when that alone should have meant a major label record deal.
Like Australia’s foreign travel advisory service – is it Smar Traveler or Smart Raveler?
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.
Or, maybe, just throwing it out there… Cursive
Eh, we’re getting away from cursive as a society as less relevant for the majority of people. We probably don’t need to encourage its use or confuse younger people unused to it.
It’s hardly used anywhere important. Like the Constitution. 😀
Which can be read, in its entirety, here:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
Look, I wouldn’t say no one should know it…but in terms of “should everybody be taught this”, they’ve already been cutting teaching how to write in cursive from schools, and I just think there’s a hundred more important things to learn than understanding cursive.
Can we please teach them to sign their names in cursive, seeing row after row of block print signatures is mentally painful.
Tragically, Courier New is one of the only fonts I know of where there’s not some kind of visual overlap between the characters i, I, l, L, or 1. But of course it’s also such a wide font.
Still trying to find the perfect™ visually unambiguous font (in serif, never mind sans serif!).
I truly hate Kia’s new logo. Plus, fun fact, if you duplicate it and rotate the duplicate on top of (above) the first one, you get a swastika! Feels like that wasn’t well-thought-out.
Anyway, aside from that, these badging issues are mostly confusing rather than ill-intentioned or something.
My bigger issue is vehicles that lack any badging. Yes, I do not know one Ferrari from another. Just put a badge on it so I know. You’re lucky I can distinguish Corvettes after whichever generation ditched the circular taillights.
Beyond that I have bigger beefs (beeves?) with vehicle naming in general.
Death to alphanumeric codes as model names. Talking to you, Mercedes, BMW, Infiniti, Mazda, Volvo, Saab, Porsche, [stops here before getting angrier]
As a kid in the ‘90s, I always thought Toyota “SR5” meant “SRS”, as in airbags. I remember looking through the window of some of those old pickups and being confused about why the steering wheel clearly didn’t have an airbag.
This is such a great one. I kinda got into cars in a serious way in the ’90s, just as airbags were popping up (out?) everywhere, and I was always confused by this.
I’ve heard a (possibly apocryphal story) where a mechanic asks a person what kind of car he’s driving and he proudly says “based on the wheel badge it’s an SRS”
That actually happened to me, had a kid call me up for brake pads for a Subaru SRS. Not kidding. Took a while to figure out what it was, with some coaching on where to find the model name.
Totally unrelated to the topic at hand but one of the BMW fixes for the oil burning in those v8s was to send out a TSB stating “instead of the usual 8 quarts of oil, put in 9 quarts at time of oil change. This way, the “low oil” light will not illuminate before the customer’s next oil change.” They didn’t try to fix it, they just added extra oil so the average owner never noticed. Horrible. Genius.
https://dot.report/bulletins/MC-10149577-9999.pdf
It’s the nikasil linings of the cylinder walls. Apparently worked fine with European gas but with American fuel that wasn’t as refined it was a disaster. At least that’s what BMW said because of course BMW said that.
I had a good friend in High School and she really wanted a BOOOGT. I think a little of her died when I told her it was 3000 GT
The Alfa Romeo Tamale commercials always make me hungry.
I always want to pronounce that at toenail.
As soon as I saw “ex-ra-tee” written out phonetically, I knew it was talking about the Merkur because I have had that exact discussion multiple times. Almost every time I then have to explain that Merkur was not a badging mistake for Mercury, even though it kind of was in that they should have badged it as a Mercury or a Ford, and the person usually loses interest.
One that made me laugh was when someone asked me about a “Pulsarks”. I had to ask a few questions, like brand and how many doors, neither or which they knew, but then they mentioned it had an odd hatchback-like rear end that looked added on and I realized they were talking about a Pulsar NX. Given how the Pulsar script is like half the font size of the NX, I still don’t know how they screwed that up…
Give me Honda CRV-EX or give me death.
For me, it was always XR4ti b/c it was so memorable – there was no other nameplate quite like it in the Ford lineup back then b/c the whole alpha-numeric thing hadn’t spawned past the Euro luxury stuff.
Like I said, I think it was that way for anyone reading the site since we saw it in the magazines long before it came out. For average Joe that knows nothing about cars, it’s often a different story.
I was a kid then – my first knowledge of it was that ad on tv where it races BMWs. “Wow what is that? It has 2 spoilers??”
Also, b/c it was the 1980s, “I don’t know what a spoiler is, but wow they seem cool…we need more of this.” I’d come to regret that view by the 2000s.
Wife asked what the heck a Toyota Turd was
Mmm….I think that’s a naming failure rather than a badging failure, if that makes sense.
Like, she correctly interpreted the intended letters “TRD”. So it’s not a badging failure.
“were gonna use English words for the acronym, but not look at what the acronym spells out”
Exactly. I think “TRD” is just another entry in the long line of “bad vehicle(/trim/etc.) names”, which is distinct from this narrower (but still interesting) question of “bad/illegible/easily misread badging.”
Most of these examples are misread though because they are meaningless (to the average person) letters and numbers. The brain tries to form words where there aren’t any.
I don’t think there is anyway you could write out XR4Ti that wouldn’t confuse literally anyone who didn’t already know what it was.
Once saw a Toyota Tacoma TRD with a vanity plate that said TRDLIFE. Dude seemed pretty proud of his truck, though.
Mazda’s first passenger car, the R360, has a badge that says “Rebo.”
https://www.below-the-radar.com/mazda-r360/#iLightbox%5Bimage_gallery_1%5D/6
I have had a few cursive-challenged teens ask me what this is:
https://www.museonicolis.com/html/uploads/2021/07/Museo-Nicolis-Lancia-Fulvia-1.3-S-ph.-Museo-Nicolis-14.jpg
Even for cursive the Fulvia badge is a little hard to read if you don’t know the car name ahead of time
There was also a Dodge Goose (600 SE) around the same time as the Pontiac Gooole.
There were a LOT of these ripoff European style numbers-followed-by-letters concoctions.
Nothing beats the Cadillac Cataracts.
When I was a kid my mom told me that grandma was having cataract surgery. I replied, “but she drives a Cordoba”…mom laughed…sadly the Cordoba did not have rich Corinthian leather
My dad’s 80 Cordoba Crown didn’t have that either, but the velour was magnificent
KN.com is still a dead link. Wish those guys would hurry up and build a website.
You’d think they’d capitalize on that. Especially where you have Chevy,com redirecting to Chevrolet.com
I can read all these just fine (shrug)
12 lgwats is a lot of lgwats.
1.21 Jigawatts! Great Scott!
Just enough to get to Hill Valley.. Its the license plate on my EV as well 🙂
Any Nissan that is an SL and AWD makes me think of cole slaw…
“Kenosha Kar Krafters”
Oof…
Indeed, I always cringed when I saw that turbocharger manufacturer in Germany called KKK.
Reminds me of the appetite suppressant candy from the 70s and early 80s called AYDs.
Or KTM bikes with WP suspension, up until very recently named White Power
Whenever I see a white Dodge/Ram Power Wagon, I hope the owner never put that much thought into it.
Yeah, likewise here, I’ve had to deal with that when ordering parts for my vintage German cars, ugh; and sometimes when I’m ordering wheel bearings for these cars I’ll find that the wheel bearings come from “Fischer’s Automatische Gussstahlkugelfabrik.” Good grief.
Current events suggest that the connotation may not be negative, in the eyes of the locality.
Sorry, but you’re wrong, it is Mister Two.
Indeed, it’s always Exrati to me as well.
I always thought Ford was going to 1337 speak decades early: XR Fourty
In french MR2 is pronounced emm air de (as in coupe ‘de’ ville). Those three sounds together spell out merde. A straight translation for “excrement”. I don’t think it sold well in France!
Someone in my old neighborhood had one with the license plate RU MRS2. Guess it never hurts to ask.