What Combination Of Letters Just Doesn’t Work As A Performance Badge?

When it comes to badging cars, certain letters are elevated above others. There’s a whole hierarchy going on—GLX and GLi outranking the humble GL, or R transcending a mere S or GT. These letters have become ingrained in the automotive consciousness. Even if you’ve never seen a given car before, you can guess at its relative value by the letters on the back.

Thanks to the last century of marketing and bluster, we all know which characters mean fast, cool, and expensive. They’ve changed and shifted over time; for example, the lowercase ‘i’ became less important as fuel injection became the norm. But what I find most interesting is the letters we don’t use.

I wanted to share with you the worst performance badges I could possibly imagine. I’ll also examine how simple letter combinations get elevated to legendary status in the first place, and how automakers leverage this to sell more cars.

Doing it Wrong

Coming up with bad performance badges is actually quite easy. You can start by removing all the popular ones currently in service on fancy sports models. Forget Type R, Type S, and anything GT—they all sound rad. You have to look to the other letters—the ones that never seem to grace the back of a desirable car.

Grab a letter—a weird one—and go nuts. Type Q sounds silly. P-Spec sounds positively dire. Imagine putting down cash for an L-Sport, or an H-Spec. They all sound like oddball hangovers from another universe; as if a stale, tweedy culture took the world by storm in the latter half of the 20th century in place of the dominant American culture we know today.

Stick together two or three weird letters, and it gets worse. “Oh yeah, I just bought the range-topper with 400 horsepower,” you’d say. “It’s the Supra YW.” It just doesn’t work. Nor would anyone want to buy a Mitsubishi Lancer PHF, a Honda Civic UJ,  or a Chevrolet Camaro MVD. They just sound random and ridiculous.

You can even spoil the good letter combinations with poorly chosen additions. GT-W hardly screams racing prowess, and RS-P doesn’t exactly get your blood pumping. Poor word choices will also spoil an otherwise exciting letter. Imagine buying a Volkswagen Scirocco R-Envelope, or a Porsche Carrera Speedy-K. Okay, the last one’s kind of cool, but you get what I’m saying here.

Ultimately, there’s a trick to making bad ones. Pick letters that have no performance link whatsoever. How could W mean anything fast? Could Q mean “big horsepower”—no it couldn’t! Beyond that, letters like P and V are dangerously close to naughty words so automakers tend to steer well clear of those as a matter of civility.

There are exceptions to these rules, of course. Automakers have, at times, dared to use some of these more obscure letters. Nissan is perhaps the most obvious example. In the 1980s, it sold the Silvia in a variety of trims themed after the traditional deck of cards—it sold Silvia J’s, Q’s, and K’s.

The J’s were naturally aspirated base models, the Q’s added a few options, while the K’s stood at the top of the lineup with the turbocharged drivetrain. They even later introduced an A’s trim, too. While it was an obvious naming convention, it failed to stick. Few owners still talk about the various trim levels today, largely referring directly to desirable engine and transmission configurations instead.

[Ed Note: Actually, in Britain, the Q-car means a high-horsepower sleeper! It’s a reference to seemingly unarmed-but-actually-quite-armed Q-ship naval vessels. -DT]. 

Good Letters

Really, though, what it comes down to is meaning. We’ll believe in just about any letter combination if it’s used for good reason. Similarly, if the first thing that comes to mind is undesirable or unrelated to performance, it’s a bad choice.

The GT badge is perhaps the best example. It was first used on the 1930 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Turismo. Loosely translated, it means Grand Touring, and in its purest form, it refers to a vehicle that combines high performance with a certain level of comfort for long drives. There’s a reason behind it, so it makes sense to us.

The GT moniker then got used on a whole bunch of vehicles from all kinds of manufacturers, most of which used it in the same way. Each new vehicle wearing a GT badge added to the narrative, to the point that it became ingrained in our collective psyche. Now, just about anyone knows that GT has at least some kind of performance connotation.

The same goes for the beloved R badge. R stands for “racing,” it’s just that simple. Nissan was the first to tack it on to the GT prefix, creating the legendary GT-R family line that continues to this day. Those three letters have come to stand for outright performance, most often stamped on halo models and race cars. Other companies prefer to use R all by itself. Honda is perhaps the best known in this regard, creating legendary Type R models for the Civic, Integra, and NSX over the years.

Overall, the GT- prefix is perhaps the most flexible performance badge. Mitsubishi built the Lancer Evo GT-A—denoting the automatic version of the rally-bred monster. Then you have legends like the Plymouth GTX or the Pontiac GTO. The latter designation typically stands for Gran Turismo Omologato, referring to specially-built roadgoing versions of racing models.

Meanwhile, Ford went oddball with the FPV GT-P. It’s traditionally a clumsy letter, as it can recall a popular part of the male anatomy, but it worked in this case. It stood for Premium, denoting a more luxurious version of the basic FPV GT.

It’s also worth making an honorable mention to Subaru here. It created a performance division named Subaru Technica International—with the unfortunate acronym of STI. And yet, through quality product and sporting success, it created a badge with a grand reputation even despite its awkward connotations.

Make Your Case

I could spend all day listing various letter combinations. You wouldn’t like most of them. You might retort to my suggestions, stating “they’re just made up!” Here’s the thing about any combination of letters, though—indeed, they’re all made up. Somebody, at some point, lashed them together in an attempt to evoke an emotion, or catch an eye. The question is always the same—how well did they do their job?

There is an excellent example of this from modernity. 2012 was the fine year that Hyundai gathered a group of researchers and engineers and tasked them with creating a new performance brand from the ground up.

The Korean automaker could have gone down a well-trodden route. It could have designated its sports models with an S or an R, as so many companies do, or some other bland existing moniker. Instead, it decided to strike out boldly by declaring the letter N its new banner for speed, performance, and handling.

This could have easily faltered, but Hyundai hit all the right marks. It rooted the choice in some real life meaning—N referred to Namyang, the Korean home of Hyundai’s R&D center, as well as the famous Nürburgring racing circuit. It developed an eye-catching N logo that would be stamped all over its performance cars, and modelled it after a chicane.

The groundwork was laid, but this alone wasn’t enough. Hyundai couldn’t simply tell everybody that “N” was now a synonym for speed. It had to prove it out in the real world. It was many years before the first N models actually hit the market, but when they did, they proved Hyundai knew what it was doing.

The 2017 Hyundai i30 N combined turbo power with a sharp aesthetic and pointy handling, and set the stage. The brand was further reinforced by the Veloster N in 2018, and the company’s entry into the World Rally Championship a further year later. A flood of high-quality, high-performance N models followed, and in a few short years, N began to become synonymous with performance in people’s brains.

It’s a formula that Hyundai executed well. It chose a letter, and had a reason to tie it to speed. It then built products emblazoned with this symbol that reinforced the connection.

An interesting corollary is the story of Lexus in recent decades. Starting in 2006, the Japanese automaker tried to make a similar move with the “F” and “F Sport” badges. The Lexus IS-F was the first product to wear the designation, a sports sedan with a healthy 416 horsepower.

The F later appeared on the Lexus LFA, RC-F, and GS-F. The letter was apparently chosen in reference to Fuji Speedway, or the word “fast”, depending on who you talk to.

It’s hard to gauge these things, but Lexus’s F doesn’t stand out quite as well as Hyundai’s N. We could speculate about a few reasons why that might be the case. For a start, Hyundai kept its branding very clean and clear. The N is virtually always a suffix—the i30 N, i20 N, Ioniq 5N, and so on. Contrast this with Lexus stuffing F in wherever it will fit.

Lexus, like Toyota, has also had a bit of a penchant for awkward letter combinations. Toyota Racing Development has always been a bit of a joke for the scatological connotations of its acronym—TRD. The company’s luxury arm isn’t quite that bad at choosing names, but few would argue that “GS-F” rolls off the tongue or inspires excellence.

Sometimes, though, all it takes is a simple pattern to make a letter combination special. The best example of this is ZR1. It was a mere option code for Chevrolet order forms, and never intended to be anything more than that. However, those in the Chevy community would refer to the code directly when referencing the high-performance engine packages, and that led to Chevrolet building models with proud “ZR1” badging years down the line.

It’s the same story for the Z06 code, too. Chevrolet didn’t set out with the intention of making these special badges for marketing purposes—it just happened naturally. People associated these alphanumeric combinations with speed, to the point where it they became a selling point and an advertising tool on their own. A happy accident—it’s nice when the order forms do the marketing for you.

Lessons To Learn

Ultimately, picking the right letters is an art more than a science. Still, there are a few lessons worth learning. Letters that hint at an obvious connection to speed are good—there’s a reason S and R are so popular, just as L is often used on luxury models. Meanwhile, letters that are used in more awkward words or with silly connotations—your Ps, Ws, Vs, and Qs—are best avoided. Connectivity is everything—you can take a letter like J and really make it work if your car is Japanese, but it doesn’t really translate to something of German or American make, for example.

You can also never go wrong with numbers—if you choose them correctly. Generally, higher numbers tend to mean “better” in the automotive world, whether they refer to a greater engine displacement, number of cylinders, or total power output. Chinese automaker BYD has been bucking the trend by badging its cars with their zero-to-60 mph times, where lower numbers are faster. BMW did something similar when it built the M1 flagship many decades back. Ultimately, though, most of us know a 5, 6 or 7 is better than a 1, 2, or 3 in most cases—you can primarily thank the Germans for that.

If you’re footloose and fancy free, though, you can always go completely off book. Tesla did that in grand style when it invented the Plaid badge, but it’s not as stupid as it sounds. It’s a reference to a popular movie—Spaceballs—in which Plaid was established as the highest speed achievable by the spaceship. It’s a silly reference, but like so many good badges , it was rooted in existing cultural knowledge—they had a reason why Plaid should mean fast.

Fundamentally, sticking to a basic level of truth really helps sell a badge. Rocket could be a fast model; Moth could not.

Few people ever get to name a car, or a specific model—those privileges ultimately fall to a small number of people buried deep in the world’s automotive companies. Still, it’s useful to explore the basis of the names that are out there—and to try and put some meaning behind why we like the names and numbers that we do. It’s still subjective at the end of the day, but the tide of human opinion always creates winners and losers. It’s always interesting to examine the patterns that create both.

Image credits: Tesla, Lewin Day, Ford, Toyota, Lexus, Nissan
Top graphic image: Toyota