Badge engineering is when one company slaps their logo on someone else’s car without changing much else. We’re pretty sure it happens when auto executives go strolling around the auto shows and then say, “Hey, that looks good, can I get one too?” A phrase that works fine when a car exec spots an ice cream cone, but doesn’t work well for car manufacturing.
Sometimes this has worked out fine for auto manufactures (like the Porsche Cayenne/VW Touareg/Audi Q7), and other times are a little half-baked (GM still apologizes for the Cadillac Cimarron.) This list celebrates the latter.
We give leniency for to many of companies who sell the same car under different names to different markets (Daewoo, we’re looking at you.) This list is more about the thinly rebadged for another company, the same company using cars that directly compete, and cars that didn’t need to be repeated. The rules for this one are simple, the car had to be for sale somewhere in the world in 2008 and be another company’s bastard lovechild
