Ugly, weird, silly, and just plain stupid car rebadges

  • Thread starter Turbo
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Asüna Sunrunner, a Geo Tracker rebadge that I just learned about. I think Asüna might have been discussed in other threads before, but I only now just remembered it. Basically, it was a short-lived brand in Canada according to wikipedia.
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and in Canada, it would later get badged as a Pontiac. Which it is really wierd seeing the tracker with a Pontiac badge, especially since they didn't put much effort into making look like a Pontiac. It's missing the Pontiac grill design.
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They also rebadged the Pontiac LeMans as this.
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Pontiac Beaumont, rebadge of the Chevrolet Chevelle
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and the Acadian Beaumont
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Replacing the single diamond with three does a remarkable job of cheapening the French styling.

Slapping a Mitsubishi badge on a Juke would have made more sense considering the current design isn't that far removed from Mitsubishi's recent output.
 
That badge on the steering wheel literally looks like a £2.99 eBay sticker jobbie. A lazy rebadge is one thing, but not even making it look competently screwed together is another.
 
I remembered one Van that I see all of the time with different badges, the Sprinter.

I'm guessing there's a good reason why it's been rebadged so much with this one.

Dodge
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Later, the Ram Promaster took its place of course.
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Freightliner
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Mercedes-Benz
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and I just got curious when searching Fiat and of course there is one, the Ducato.
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You can usually find the USPS driving them around with their own badge.
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Volkswagen
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Foton Toano
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JAC Sunray
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The reason the Sprinter was rebadged as a Freightliner, then a Dodge and Freightliner, then just a Freightliner again is simple: Mercedes in the US was not positioned on the market to have fleet sales; with none of the reputation of base model E-Class diesels with 2 million miles being used as taxis or anything. Their dealer network had no fleet sales experience/support and most of them still have no interest in getting it. Freightliner and Dodge both had tons of it, so selling it in the US in those dealerships after importing them as knockdown kits was a quick and dirty solution to the problem that Mercedes was able to eke out for two decades until they pawned the remains of Chrysler off on US taxpayers and spun off Freightliner into a separate parent company. To wit: When they initially stopped selling the Sprinter in the US as a Dodge, sales collapsed for several years before they were able to lure anyone back to what they were before; but they never were anything but a fraction of the sales that Ford gets out of the Transit or even what Chevrolet gets with the 25 year old Express. Right after they announced that Freightliner-badged sales were going to stop (following the company changing hands last year) and it would only be badged as a Mercedes they separately announced that most configurations of the Sprinter will be discontinued as well, so it's on extremely borrowed time in the US and I suspect losing Freightliner's support infrastructure is heavily to blame even if Freightliner wasn't getting as many raw sales as Mercedes was.





Same thing with the Metris, which they attempted to use to give them a stronger fleet presence in the US but never received any interest beyond the USPS purchase; and that's already confirmed to be dead here.
 
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Tornado
The reason the Sprinter was rebadged as a Freightliner, then a Dodge and Freightliner, then just a Freightliner again is simple: Mercedes in the US was not positioned on the market to have fleet sales; with none of the reputation of base model E-Class diesels with 2 million miles being used as taxis or anything. Their dealer network had no fleet sales experience/support and most of them still have no interest in getting it. Freightliner and Dodge both had tons of it, so selling it in the US in those dealerships after importing them as knockdown kits was a quick and dirty solution to the problem that Mercedes was able to eke out for two decades until they pawned the remains of Chrysler off on US taxpayers and spun off Freightliner into a separate parent company. To wit: When they initially stopped selling the Sprinter in the US as a Dodge, sales collapsed for several years before they were able to lure anyone back to what they were before; but they never were anything but a fraction of the sales that Ford gets out of the Transit or even what Chevrolet gets with the 25 year old Express. Right after they announced that Freightliner-badged sales were going to stop (following the company changing hands last year) and it would only be badged as a Mercedes they separately announced that most configurations of the Sprinter will be discontinued as well, so it's on extremely borrowed time in the US and I suspect losing Freightliner's support infrastructure is heavily to blame even if Freightliner wasn't getting as many raw sales as Mercedes was.





Same thing with the Metris, which they attempted to use to give them a stronger fleet presence in the US but never received any interest beyond the USPS purchase; and that's already confirmed to be dead here.
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Okay then, that's more than a good enough reason to me. Wanting to get into the fleet sales into the US, but didn't have the same reputation in fleets as elsewhere with their E-Class taxis.

Is that the same reason for the other badges on vans in other markets or no?
 
The Fiat Ducato isn't based on the Sprinter. It's the original van that the Promaster is based off of. The USPS van is actually the Metris instead of the Sprinter. The two Chinese vans are I assume Mercedes kowtowing to the Chinese protectionist laws that you need to partner with a Chinese company to sell cars in China. For the Crafter I'm assuming VW wanted to get their name in the ring in a cheap way to see if they could make any inroads in the market before they debuted their own van in that segment that was fully designed by them like their current one is.
 
I've noticed quite a few of these popping up locally, almost to the point of being more common than the original Chevrolet badged versions. International CV series trucks that are basically Silverado HDs.
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A diesel powered Honda Concerto was offered in France, Italy and Portugal towards the tail end of its run. So it was just a case of dropping the engine into a regular Concerto, right?

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1995 Honda Concerto 1.8 TD by Nutrilo, on Flickr

Or slap a few badges on the existing TD Rover 218.
 
Saw this thread, thought pretty much immediately of this:
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Suzuki Forenza aka rebadged Daewoo Lacetti saloon. Likely contributed (among other Daewoo rebadges like the Reno and Verona) to Suzuki's demise and exit as a car brand in the US, and looks like a bad SEAT knockoff in the process. Just wonderful /s
 
I distinctly remember that digi-dash being in the Pontiac LeMon, too. When it inevitably stopped working correctly the speedometer would function normally until it hit 50MPH, then start slowly ticking back down to 0 and not do anything until you shut the car off and restarted it. Typical late '80s GM rubbish.
 
Rossell2
I remember that being one of Daewoos UK launch models back in the late nineties.
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My Dad was consulting for Dae-woo around the time of their UK market launch, the Espero and Nexia were colloquially termed as the Despero and then Nexyear... the later being Dae-woo's perpetual answer to the question, when will we have our own platform.
 

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