DriveTimes Five

Great car-badge origin stories

Some car manufacturer logos are pretty selfexplanatory – Jaguar has a jaguar, Honda has an ‘H’, Hyundai has a different ‘H’ and Ford has a blue oval with ‘Ford’ scribbled on it. But what are the stories behind the less obvious ones? Here are five we think are pretty interesting.

Mercedes-Benz

The Three-Pointed Star is probably one of the best-known car-company logos in the world, but who knows what it really means? The star is actually a modest statement of intent. It represents the company’s ‘‘motorised domination of the air, land and sea’’. Which doesn’t seem scary at all. Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft trademarked two star logos in 1909; the other had four points, but it was never used. Maybe if Mercedes-Benz ever decides to tackle outer space it can use that one.

BMW

Despite long being rumoured to reflect BMW’s roots in aircraft manufacturing, supposedly representing a white propeller spinning against a blue sky, the real story behind its badge is far less glamorous. The blue and white sections simply represent the Bavarian flag, but different enough to comply with the legal ban on using national symbols in a commercial trademark. The propeller theory came about from a print advertisement that used the logo as the propeller of a plane in 1929, 12 years after the badge was first used.

Alfa Romeo

Certainly one of the most evocative car badges in the world, the Alfa Romeo logo is also one of the most mysterious. While the section on the left half is straight forward (the red cross is the symbol of Milan), why is that snake/dragon eating a small red man? It’s quite a long story, but basically a bloke called Otone Visconti fought and killed a Saracen knight, then took the symbols on the Saracen’s shield back to Milan. Alfa insists the poor little red bloke isn’t being eaten; rather, he is emerging from the creature’s mouth as a ‘‘purified new man’’. Okay then.

Chevrolet

There are actually four different theories behind the origin of the Chevrolet ‘bowtie’. The first is that Chevrolet co-founder William C Durant saw the design in the wallpaper in a hotel room and liked it, the second says that he scribbled it on a piece of paper at dinner one night, while the third says he simply nicked the idea from an existing logo he saw in another advertisement! The fourth theory says that the bowtie is a stylised version of the cross on the Swiss flag, where the company’s other co-founder, Louis Chevrolet, was born.

Subaru

While Subaru means ‘united’ in Japanese, it is also the name for the Plieades star cluster in the Taurus constellation, which is one of the closest and most highly visible to Earth. Handily, it also represents the six companies that merged in 1953 to form Fuji Heavy Industries, the parent company of Subaru. Confusingly, Plieades is also known as The Seven Sisters and, under good conditions, those with very good eyesight can see up to 12 stars in the cluster. But only six are easily visible to most observers.