Badge engineering — the process by which one carmaker takes another maker’s car, slaps their own badges and name on it and sells it — has always been a little baffling to me. I suppose retail markups are enough that you can make money doing this? I mean, they must, because they do it plenty. And often, weirdly.
There’s something really peculiar and satisfying about spotting a badge-engineered car. You feel a little like you’re seeing past the manufacturer’s silly game, and that gives you a few moments of feeling nice and superior, a feeling that lasts, if you’re me, until you pass the next reflective surface.
Still, it’s fun to see if you can figure out these out. So, to enhance that fun, let’s have a quiz. In this quiz, you’ll see a bunch of badge-engineered cars, and you need to tell me what the badge on the car is. Not the original car, I want to know what the badge the re-branded car in the picture is. Even if you can ID the source car, the re-badger is often tricky. So let’s see how you do.
Good luck!