My wife and I were in the car earlier today and we hit a stop light behind another car that caught our attention. It had an upside-down V for a badge and absolutely no other identification of any kind.
I know Acura uses an upside-down V, but searching brought up no other models than the NSX sports car that had no lettering. This car, however, had an ordinary sedan-type rear that looks nothing like an NSX. And it was all white. Some TSX models in silver have silver lettering that might be missed but white rears show them off very visibly.
We both agree on what we saw and we both were struck by the lack of letters or numbers on the plain rear. No other brands came up that were possibilities. It definitely wasn’t Infinity. Any ideas?
The Acura badge is the letter A. Most likley you either saw an Infiniti which uses a style similar to an upside down V or a car with an aftermarket badge. I used to have the transformer logo on the back of my Altima Coupe years ago. Confused the hell out of people who had never seen a two door Altima.
Aftermarket badge is more likely. I drove an Infiniti G35 for a decade. Great car. I would recognize their logo and this looked nothing like it. While we’re on unanswered questions, who can tell me why Infiniti went from a great car to a boring alsoran?
Recently retired Nissan engineer here. The Infiniti brand took a big hit during Covid when the chip and parts crisis became critical. Infiniti being a top level brand was greatly impacted and there were long delays in getting orders fulfilled, longer than most other brands since they did not have any low end, base models to make up for demand. Also a lot of questionable product was delivered, hurting the brand reputation.
That and just about all Infinities are produced in Japan (some in Mexico), so tariffs have now impacted them as well. The volume of Infiniti sales was always low in the US and now it is so low there is not much margin for profit. I don’t think it will survive much longer, but I could be wrong.
Also, Nissan doesn’t build Infiniti for the Japan market, they have top end Nissan branded cars that make Infiniti look like a mid-tier brand. So they don’t benifit from a large volume of sales in other markets, its just a mainly US brand.
A while back, when Elon Musk was making a big deal of his adoration of Mr. Trump, there was a flurry of vandalism toward Tesla cars. There was also a flurry of organized rebadging of Tesla cars, removing the “T” logo and replacing it with logos from other makes. Some of them were left badgeless, and perhaps some were given mystery badges.
If you could choose a new logo for your ride, or make one up, what would you choose?
I was told by a car dealer that debadging your car reduces it’s value. They claim that potential customers assume the car was in a rear end collision and that the shop saved money by not replacing the badges. Then they have to pay to put new badges on the car.
I got an old Mitsubishi (Dodge) with a BMW roundel on it to make it feel it at home. Its often mistaken for a Toyota. The license plate claims it something else altogether.
There was a comedian that used to drive around in an old Volkswagen Rabbit with a license plate that was “BOBS BMW”. When people would say “That’s not a BMW!” he would answer “I’m not Bob!”.
