This Is Just Too Many Badges For The Back Of One Car

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As you may have heard, tomorrow is the huge Galpin Car Show, and I’m here to help represent The Autopian in our little microcar-filled corner, so I’m here in lovely Los Angeles, the City Of Angles, obtuse and acute. As David and I were driving around town, possibly fighting crimes, we were driving behind this particular Jaguar I-Pace, and noticed something significant: that car has too many badges. Now, I didn’t have a hard and fast rule about the number or amount of badges that were acceptable on the back of a given car, but this I-Pace definitely crossed the line. You can just feel it.

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Let’s just look at it, and figure out what pushes it too far: there’s a leaping chrome Jaguar, but in case that’s not clear enough, the name JAGUAR is spelled out below it. Then on one side we have the model name, I-Pace, the other side says EV400, commemorating Jaguar’s four centuries of building EVs (I assume), and then under that is a little AWD badge, and then, finally, mounted dead center, is a FIRST EDITION badge.

It’s the FIRST EDITION one that I think pushes it over the edge. Things were already borderline, with five separate badges on that tailgate, so the addition of some big chrome typography is definitely not helping. To be fair, I’m not sure the FIRST EDITION badging was factory; that looks like something maybe an overeager dealer installed, or an owner tired of people not understanding that this I-Pace is, edition-wise, first.

With anything that’s overdone, it’s fun to imagine it being more overdone, because once you cross that line, why not keep going, right? I mean, why not do this:Ipace Badges

People have a right to know what’s going on in your car, spelled out in chrome! If there’s no DOHCs or Turbos or injection of fuel to crow about, you just have to be more creative!

Anyway, the important thing is I feel like now we have a baseline: One to four badges, okay, five badges, borderline, six and up: too many badges.

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72 thoughts on “This Is Just Too Many Badges For The Back Of One Car”

  1. I agree – this crosses some previously unestablished line. Perhaps we give them the benefit of the doubt and say that this particular example is over-badged for show purposes? Because otherwise, it is a rare aesthetic misstep by Jaguar. Whether their cars actually run or not, they have never been known for making things that just don’t look right. Jaguars always look just right.

  3. On my first car – the infamous ’79 Ford Taunus station wagon – I wrote “Limited Edition” in a rectangle with a magic marker under the sad 1.6L badge, because it was phone company orange, which I found rather rare. The rest of them were probably scrapped at that time…

    And no, I’m not from Sweden, where orange Televerket cars are everywhere, the KTAS (Copenhagen Telephone Limited Company) also used orange cars 🙂

  7. Once manufacturers started using double stick stuff instead of holes and clips to attach emblems I began debadging my vehicles. Before that, I painted them black on my dark green Accord. So, yeah, I think more than one badge front and rear is too much.

    1. Like you, I’m a de-badger. Such a cleaner look and makes hand-washing easier.

      It makes one wonder about the purpose of badges. I’m pretty sure it’s just manufacturer advertising or something else I’m against.

  9. It’s not funny.
    You’ve got to do your part Torch, take the fishing line and saw those badges free.
    It is not debadging vandalism, it is a attempt to return some semblance of good taste to this storied brand.

      1. I’d say it depends on the car and the era. If I ever get the second-gen Firebird I’ve been pining for since 1977 (see profile pic), I would hope it still has a chrome dealer badge on the decklid or rear fascia, from the place where it was bought new. If it didn’t have one, I would scour every junkyard in my hometown for a Williams Pontiac-Cadillac dealer badge, and pretend that I had bought it brand new as a baby or a little kid.

        See also: pickup trucks with dealer-installed step bumpers with the dealership name and city stamped in the metal. https://67-72chevytrucks.com/vboard/attachment.php?attachmentid=1125566&stc=1&d=1372266684

      2. I have an 80s Olds Cutlass wagon with the original Grand Oldsmobile decal on the tailgate. Was a prominent dealer for decades. Lots of people like it when they comment on the car. Especially at shows, in Lansing there was someone who knew the actual salesman who sold it to the original owner. The car was also missing a badge when I got it, so I replaced it for originality.

        On newer cars, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass one way or another. But someday, probably long after I’m gone, whatever’s left of today’s cars will be at shows too.

        On the Jag, yeah I think the other badges are about the limit. I’ve seen cars with Make, Model, Trim Level, Engine Size, Turbo, Number of drive wheels. Which at shows made me inquire about the car since it was no longer a run of the mill model but a rare one. But First Edition, why?

      3. The dealer gave me $3 off a service if I allowed them to put their license plate frames on the car. They just say ” of ” so it doesn’t bother me, and $3 is $3.

      1. At least the license plate frame can be easily removed. (It’s annoying AF when the front plate is just screwed into the plastic front bumper fascia).

  11. As David and I were driving around town, possibly fighting crimes

    *looks at JT’s shirt in the video*

    Catman and Hobnobbin’! But which one is which? 😉

    Catmen and Galpin?

    [our heroes enter and see a baddie affixing unnecessary letters (poorly) to a Jaaag]

    [a fight ensues]

    UTE! PAO! JEEP! TORCH!

    Tune in next week to see the exciting conclusion!

        1. Kenny Rogers Roasters has 156 restaurants in 10 countries, still very much alive (just not in the US anymore, the last location here closed in 2011)

  13. If memory serves me correct, back in the early 80’s a Nissan pickup tailgate used every corner of the real estate to advertise the features of the truck. Big bold Nissan letters across the tailgate and the corners advised that it had a 5 speed, king cab, and the respective trim level. I always remember it looking to cluttered.

    1. And for one glorious year, there was Datsun down in the corner as well as Nissan boldly across the center. I think it was the ’83 model year? Not certain about that though.

    2. The worst in my mind are the “limited” badges on a lot of Jeeps and some other brands that I have noticed.

      They are clearly not limited in quantity, so are we to assume that they are limited in ability?

  15. It’s definitely the FIRST EDITION which makes this too much. The close-up photo isn’t ultra-clear, but it seems to have been added rather shoddily. It doesn’t seem straight, and maybe it’s my imagination, but it’s not perfectly centered either, compared with the Jaguar (both written and illustrated). What a minor but stupid thing to do to your car.

    1. Granted, without argument, that the FIRST EDITION is done poorly. But I propose to you, with some bleary-eyed Sunday-morning MSPaint analysis, that it was done better than the Jaguar logo was.

      Shonky analysis ahoy!

      Lines 5 and 6 (in red) are key, and reveal some of the skew in the image. They follow the line of the license plate, within a few degrees of my patience with MSPaint and the effort a Sunday-morning post is worth. The goal here is to get a frame of reference of the image skew.

      I can’t rule out that it’s some kind of crazy parallelogram license plate (Hey, Jason, are there such things?) but assuming it’s still a proper rectangle, kindly note that the last letters of the JAGUAR and LIMITED EDITION line up nicely with line 6.

      You can argue line 5 isn’t that precise. NONE of it is that precise, but it’s good enough for the back of this MSPaint napkin. Let me give you line 7, in blue, which is how much skew I have to throw in to get everything lined up right off the license plate..

      Is the license plate centered? MOSTLY. It’s ~350 px from the left marker, ~320px from the right. (I used horizontal lines off the bottom of the license plate–lines not shown.)

      Are the JAGUAR and LIMITED EDITION things centered?
      1 and 2: Jaguar lines: ~375 and ~325 px.
      3 and 4: LIMITED EDITION: ~610px and ~500 px.

      There’s a skew factor, of course, but I’ll put it to you that the LIMITED EDITION probably has better centering than the Jaguar logo does.

      There’s so much other work I should be doing, and I’ve invested too much effort in this, only to want to throw up my hands and cry, “I can’t account adequately for the skew factor!”

      Thank you and good night.

  17. I remember this being big when the S197 Mustang came out, with some dealers trying to make an extra buck by convincing buyers that aftermarket wheels, stripes, and perhaps a K&N filter equaled an old-school Tasca or Yenko special build. So of course they had extra badges. Don’t really see it as much anymore, thankfully.

  18. I prefer to debadge everything that I can on a vehicle. I’m not here to brag about how much I spent on a trim level or engine. I have the same philosophy about clothing. Now if Volkswagen or the University of Michigan, for that matter, want to pay me to drive/walk around advertising their brand, I’m listening. As for paying my own money to advertise for a company, not so much.

  20. I think Torch is right about the “First Edition” badge being a dealer add-on. It could be the angle of the camera, but it looks like that badge isn’t centered. The N in “Edition” is under the R in “Jaguar,” but the F and I are to the left of the J.

    Also, the “First Edition” badge might as well say “Sucker Edition.” It’s often good to wait a model year or two for any bugs or reliability issues to be worked out. Especially true for a Jaguar.

  21. The ‘First Edition’ one is clearly aftermarket, which only makes it worse.

    Are most people blind to font and typeface? A lack of consistency of font on aftermarket badging makes it stick out so much, along with wonky, uneven placement, they always look awful, do folk who add these not see what I see?

  22. Kind Sir, you have obviously never bought a boombox or cassette recorder new in the 80’s, or you’ll realize how naked and lean this car’s behind is.

    LED Meter, Super Mega Bass Boost System, 2x800w RMSXYZ, Auto Reverse Full Stop, Dolby ABCDEFG, Auto Azimuth Subsonic MPX, SuperFast Rewind…

    All this was on stickers, tags, and little pieces of cardboard sleeves that would hang on corners. I still keep them all on my Sharp.

  23. Praise Yaweh it doesn’t say “First Ever”

    I have always been profoundly offended by the extreme conceit that every new model is going to have such an impact that years from now anyone will actually give a flying fuck that it was the first ever, or edition, or whatever. To me it’s purely a cynical marketing ploy meant to suck naive buyers into thinking they had the foresight to be the first to be in the know. I cannot wait for this trend to end.

    Desperate much Jaguar? Perhaps a badge that say “You’re so smart and people really, really like you.”

    1. The idea of boasting “partial “ is so weird. Lots more ideas for Subaru though: PBCVT ( partially bearable CVT), PAI(partially acceptable interior), you can invent your own…

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