THE BEST BEHIND THE BADGE

Badge engineering has been a fact of motoring life for as long as any of us can remember, but it seems particularly prevalent right now. With new-car development costs at an all-time high, particularly with the rush towards electrification, increasing numbers of manufacturers see design sharing as a way of saving costs as well as expanding their model ranges. It’s why you can now buy a Toyota RAV4 badged as a Suzuki Across, and it’s why the 2022 Mazda 2 Hybrid is a rebadged Toyota Yaris.

Then, of course, there are countless examples of different marques within the same corporate group sharing designs, hence the soon-to-be-discontinued VW Up being pretty much identical to the SEAT Mii and Skoda Citigo. It’s a fine tradition dating back to the early post-war years, with the 1952 creation of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) in particular seeing a plethora of badge-engineered models filling innumerable niches in the market.

When done well, badge engineering can be a win-win. It enables manufacturers to save money, it offers consumers some extra choice, and it often means an extended career for an otherwise under-threat marque. So, let’s take a look at some of the best – and worst – examples of badge engineering.

BENTLEY T-SERIES

The success of the Bentley S-series – a badge-engineered version of the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud – inevitably meant that a winged-B version of the next-generation range would be available. Where the old S1 to S3 had sold well by Bentley standards, however, the T-series of 1965 – announced alongside