Badges? They Don’t Need ...
By NEIL DUNLOP
Published: October 9, 2009
New York Times
To an American, the sight draws a blank. All over Europe one sees cars, mostly from high-end companies, that wear no nameplates or model designations. Where we would expect to find a nametag of gleaming letters and numbers on the tail, there’s only an expanse of paint.
These nameless cars aren’t rare in Europe, either. If not in the majority, they are a sizeable minority.
“They’re ordered from the factory that way,” said Christian Bokich, a spokesman for Audi of America. In Germany, the reasons may be cultural. “If a director of a medium-sized company purchases a V-12, he doesn’t want to show it to his colleagues and have people judge him incorrectly,” he said. The fear, he added, is that others might think, “‘You’re a jerk, you’re too rich, you have too nice a car.’”
Mr. Bokich said that while 25 percent of Audis were ordered with the “badge delete” option, the practice was more common with top models.
“It’s a very German thing to hide your wealth,” he said. Others may be trying to hide their lack of riches. In Munich a while back, a man driving an expensive
BMW 650i — its badge proudly displayed — was asked why so many cars went badgeless. He answered, “So no one can tell if they bought the cheap or expensive model.”
How can you tell if you’re looking at a 6-cylinder BMW 525i or a 540i with a V-8? Is that an
Audi A4 2.0 or the more powerful (and costly) 3.2? Over there, that could be a luxurious but not uncommon Mercedes S500 — or the top-of-the-line S65 AMG.
In some cases an automotive sleuth can discern the truth by following secondary clues like exhaust pipes, body trim, wheels and other styling cues. Of course, only the hardest-core gearheads carry around a mental encyclopedia of model characteristics. And secondary clues can be misleading, given that fancy wheels and sporty trim can be ordered even for base models — the equivalent of sewing an embroidered Polo pony onto a Gap shirt.
Will Europeans’ embrace of badgeless cars make its way across the Atlantic? It seems unlikely; unless the recession fundamentally changes the national psyche, Americans seem to prefer flaunting wealth, even if it’s only pretend-riches. Officials at BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi say they haven’t seen an uptick in requests for badgeless cars or post-sale label removal.
None of the companies offer a badge-delete option to American customers, but spokesmen for all three said the labels could be removed at dealerships.
In fact, Rob Moran, public relations manager for Mercedes-Benz USA, said it was more common for Americans to add badges. The results can be silly, like affixing an AMG label (signifying cars from Mercedes’s high-performance division) to an older C-Class that was never offered in AMG form. “Technically,” he said, “that car doesn’t exist.”
