Badge engineering gone mad: Toyota emblems available from GM

The practice of badge engineering another company's cars can have some unexpected consequences...

Back in 1996, Toyota sold their own Toyota-branded version of the Chevrolet Cavalier (above) to the Japanese domestic market. The Cavalier was a major flop in Japan and most people forgot about it, but now the auto-sleuths over at Automobile have discovered that the Toyota Cavalier left a bizarre legacy: because all Cavaliers were built in the USA in GM's factories, the Toyota emblems and badging for the JDM model were added to GM's parts catalogue and assigned GM part numbers. That's right, you can buy the badge of one of the world's largest automakers from the dealerships of its chief rival.

What a crazy, incestuous world we live in.

[Automobile]