Name that Car #5: Gimme five!

5 ---(analysis)-----> Car!

I have an unhealthy obsession with automotive badges, hood ornaments, nameplates, and similar. So let's get right into it. What you see here is a single digit: 5. This is not a junkyard find; it was part of road debris. Don't worry, I didn't just steal private property immediately after an accident. This hunk of plastic had been on the side of the road for weeks and was obviously just rubbish to be picked up.

It is quite apparent from the construction and appearance of this 5 that it comes from the exterior bodywork of some kind of motor vehicle. The trouble is, a great many cars might have the number 5 associated with them.

Can we identify what vehicle lost a 5 from its exterior bodywork simply by the shape, size, material, and style of this digit alone? Why not? We've never been stumped on Name that Car before!

If we can't do it, who can? 

I'm sorry, I wrote that wrong. The real motto of this feature is "If we don't do it, who would?"

The following is a non-exhaustive list of vehicles* which had a 5 in their title which probably had it on external badging, in no particular order. Let's start with vehicles that necessarily have a five in their name:

• Mazda 5, CX-5
• Audi A5, S5, RS5
• BMW X5
• Any BMW 5 series (too many to list)
• Nissan 350Z

Vehicles whose name itself contained a 5 if a certain engine was specified:

• BMW x35, x25, x45...
• Mercedes x250, x350, xx55 AMG, xx65 AMG, etc.

Vehicles which had** a separate specific engine badge containing 5:

• Vehicles with a 1.5L I4:
• I know of many, but none of them are particularly proud of an engine so small, so I don't think any have external badging
• Vehicles with a 2.5L I4/I5:
• Volvo S40/S60 2.5T
• Volkswagen Golf/Jetta/Passat 2.5
• Ford Duratec 25:
• Ford Escape
• Ford Fusion
• Mercury Milan
• Ford Transit Connect
• Vehicles with a 3.5L V6:
• Chrysler OHC V6:
• Dodge Intrepid
• Chrysler New Yorker
• Chrysler 300M
• Chrysler 300
• Chrysler Concorde
• Dodge Avenger
• etc.
• Ford Duratec 35:
• Ford Edge
• Lincoln MKZ
• Lincoln MKX
• Ford Taurus
• Ford Flex
• Ford Explorer
• etc.
• Nissan VQ and VG
• Nissan Maxima
• Nissan Altima
• Nissan Frontier
• Ack! GM and Toyota have too many 3.5L V6 engines to list.
• Vehicles with a 5.xL V8:
• 5.0L:
• Ford Mustang
• Ford LTD
• Ford LTD Crown Victoria
• Chevrolet Camaro
• Pontiac Firebird
• Many, many other cars that used the Ford Windsor V8 or Chevy small-block 305
• 5.4L:
• Ford Expedition
• Ford Excursion
• 5.6L:
• Nissan Titan
• 5.7L:
• Chevrolet Corvette
• Chevrolet Chevelle
• Chevrolet Malibu
• Chevrolet Imapala SS
• Dodge Challenger
• Dodge Charger
• Jeep Grand Cherokee
• Chrysler 300C
• Many, many, many, many, many other vehicles with American V8s of near 350 cubic inches
• 5.8L:
• Ford Mustang SVT Cobra
• Ford F-150
• 5.9L:
• The Chrysler LA 360 cubic inch engine worked out to 5.9 L. I have only seen this in metric units on the Jeep Grand Cherokee of the late 90s.
• The very famous Cummins 5.9L I6 diesel that went into heavy duty Dodge pickups never received factory badging that contained the number 5.
• 6.5L V12:
• Lamborghini Murcielago LP650-4.... hahaha. Not in my neighborhood.
• 7.5L V8:
• Ford had a 460 cubic inch engine, which is 7.5L. Not that common to see these anymore, but it's possible. This is one of the largest engines made after WWII, so we won't go any higher.

Vehicles with a separate trim badge containing 5 (not necessarily related to engine).

• Chevy Silverado 1500/2500/3500...
• Ford F-150/250/350...
• GMC Sierra 1500/2500/3500...
• Dodge Ram 1500/2500/3500...
• Toyota Tacoma/4Runner/Tundra SR5

*- Only counting vehicles available in the American market after 1985, let's be serious here.
**- I know this isn't an exhaustive list. I'm going with what I can think of off the top of my head. If you want to tell me all the cars I missed with a certain engine, bear in mind (1) that thinking of every car in the world isn't necessarily helpful to finding the answer; and (2) that not all cars have engine badges. Please direct your comments to my logfile, which is located at /dev/null.

Happily, to whittle down this enormous list, there are five key characteristics of this letter we can examine.

Comparison to 1989 Honda badge

1. It's plastic. Through the 80s and even into the beginning of the 90s, badges were almost all metal or enamel. This would seem to indicate it's from a car within the past 20 years.
2. It's in pretty good shape. Still very shiny. Again, this says that it's probably not on the earlier side of our scale. I would bet already that this badge came from the 21st century.
3. It's physically large. Larger cars generally have larger badges, as do pickup trucks. I put it up against a 1980's Honda badge. The Honda front emblem is bigger singly, but the 5 is just a single digit of what is surely a larger nameplate. If it were three or four digits, that would be quite large.
4. Subjectively, the font is long, thick, simple, aggressive, and modern. That points to pickup truck.
5. It wasn't broken off of any other number clusters. This 5 stood alone, so it's unlikely that it was part of any engine badging (except Mercedes). That's a relief because there are too many options there.

Bearing in mind point #5, and eliminating engines entirely, there are many models which had free-standing 5s as part of their badging, but there are five subtle differences.

BMW: Classy, but not it.

Mercedes: Not even close.

1. Mercedes uses a smooth, traditional font which has been almost unchanged for decades. It's not a good match.
2. BMW's 5-Series always carries a freestanding 5. But it uses more angular numbers and letters in their badging. The 5 you see as part of the 5-Series badge is typical, and it's also not a good match.
3. The Mazda 5 badge uses a script 5. The Mazda CX-5 is different, but it had a pronounced dip roughly near the centroid of the 5. This doesn't match the style of the 5 we are looking at.
4. Audi has a handful of models which use a freestanding 5, but Audi's 5 is extremely thin, feminine, and rather tall, so it's almost exactly the opposite sort of shape.
5. The Nissan 350Z badge is very, very close! They both have a straight edge between the top line of the five and the downward stroke. But the curve of the 5 on the 350Z is a more like a rounded-off square-like shape, while my 5 is a genuine curve. At first glance I really saw them as identical, but the 350Z badge is a little too small to have produced a 5 this large, and the minor stylistic differences become apparent on closer examination.

   

   Nissan 350Z: I thought it was a dead ringer at first.

Bearing in mind point #3, and the fact that this was found in Houston, statistics would suggest a relatively good possibility that this was a pickup truck's badge. Let's look at five possibilities.

Ford F-150: One-piece only.

1. Toyota used the trim SR5 on lots of its trucks, but the badge always came in one piece, so 5 did not stand alone.
2. The Ford F-150 is the best-selling pickup truck in the US, and its larger siblings the F-250, F-350 and so on generally lead their own classes. But (since at least the 80s) the F-Series badges are one-piece for all the models, so this is a moot point.
3. The Chevrolet Silverado is a strong second-place in this market; its cousin the GMC Sierra is almost identical. They both have the same badging as well. On older GM pickups, the 1500/2500/... badge was one-piece, but for recent models, there are single free-standing digits. It has a lot of similarities that lead me to continue to think pickups are the answer. Despite this, the 5 in the 2500 you see to the right is very angular and squared off, so we're not seeing quite the right style.
4. GMC is largely the same story as Chevy. Although GMC had its own engines in the 1960s and earlier, they have been exactly the same as Chevrolet trucks with only minor trim details for at least 30 years. The badging remains the same. It would be a fool's errand to try to differentiate the 1500 badge between a GMC and a Chevy. They are exactly the same, with no material or apparent differences.



Chevy/GMC badge: Very close indeed!

5. The Dodge Ram generally comes 3rd in the pickup truck market. In 2010, Chrysler created a Ram brand that was separate from Dodge, so they are no longer Dodge trucks. The newest Ram 1500 pickups trucks DO have free-standing letters and they are awfully close in shape to my 5 here. But

   

   Newest Ram is also close, but not correct.

   they're not identical. The older Dodge Rams from the mid-2000s, though, are a perfect match! Prior to 2002, the Rams used single-piece 1500 trim badges like Ford and GM. However, Dodge/Ram also uses a single-piece badge for the 2500 and higher spec; these are "heavy duty" and so contain the trim level (2500, 3500, 4500) in silver surrounded in black with the silver words "Heavy Duty" surrounded in red below. Thus, we can infer it is not a heavy-duty truck.

2002-2008 Dodge Ram 1500. Lone Star trim pictured.

Conclusion: I have high confidence that this 5 came from a 2002-2008 Dodge Ram 1500. If you know better than me and have something to add, please mention it in the comments. I'll give you a high five!

Name that Car #4: Unnamed wagon in Target Facebook ad

Posted by Target on Facebook August 20, 2013

What we have here is a classic scene from American late 20th century culture: a station wagon filled with stuff that a college student will need to live on his or her own for the next four glorious years.

As you can see, I "like" Target. The main reason I shop at Target is because the service, quality and (surprisingly) prices of my local Walmart are very poor indeed. Yet one of the reasons I "like" Target is that they don't have ridiculous "edgy" advertising. This is just lighthearted, feel-good stuff. This particular picture kinda reminds me of 1980's commercials with their warm tones and happy jingles.

Wait! Look at the wagon! No wonder it reminds me of the 80's... that wagon looks like it's from about 1980. I perfectly understand the need of non-automotive companies to use completely nondescript, unidentifiable vehicles in their advertising, since they don't want to alienate buyers of other car brands or peg their company to the image of the brand you see on the screen. Generally this effect is silly, since they resort to debadging a 1980s BMW or similar, and just assume we'll write it off as a boxy old car with no known provenance. This does much of the same thing. Target doesn't sell cars and they don't really want you to know or care what wagon this is. But too bad for them, because I do care, and I will figure it out.

They did a good job making it look nondescript. The tailgate is up and out of the way, preventing us from seeing the badge itself. The design language of the rear end is neither very distinctive nor very recent...  this looks like a car I have probably not seen on the roads in a long time.

1985 Mercedes W123 looks great, but it's not the one.

My first impression when I saw it was Mercedes-Benz. Compare it to a W123 or W201 wagon, though, and you see that the Mercs always had a certain texture to the glass that this wagon doesn't share. It's obviously not a Merc, or an Audi, which had decidedly square taillights.

The triangular amber indicators that you see at the top of the taillight cluster flummoxed me for a bit. Almost all of the period wagons that would be known to North Americans had proud upright rectangles for taillights. All of my earliest guesses for American makes were badly wrong: Ford Fairmont (no resemblence), Ford LTD (none here either), or even ugly Japanese wagons like the Nissan Prairie. All were highly angular and had none of that comparatively interesting shape of the rear that we see on this example.

So I did a few more Google image searches of early-80s wagons that I could remember. I stuck with the German idea and it hit me that it might be a Volkswagen, simply because they were the most likely to have this kind of obscure, never-used-again design language for a station wagon rear end.

VW sold lots of popular world cars in the United States, but generally only after giving them silly NA-specific names. None of them did very well except the Beetle. The Volkswagen Golf was sold here as the Rabbit, the Volkswagen Type 181 was sold as the Thing, and the first-gen VW Passat made it to the States as the Volkswagen Dasher. I am not sure if the names made them especially memorable, because they have almost totally faded from the American consciousness.  Though the Mk 1 Golf was beloved in Europe, even assembling the car in the US did not help its appeal very much in the States, and the Golf never recaptured the appeal of the old Beetle on our shores.

The Dasher was even more of an odd fellow. As American cars of the 1970s go, it was quite small, but it was the biggest Volkswagen you could buy, and it was not especially cheap. Original MSRP (according to NADA) on a 1978 Volkswagen Dasher wagon was a hefty $6,375. Bearing in mind that 1970s dollars were worth quite a lot of modern dollars, you could have saved almost two grand buying a Chevy Nova of comparable size (although gas mileage and refinement would be much worse) and saved a bit by buying yourself a fancy Buick or a titillating Pontiac Firebird Formula with the top 180-hp V8. I actually still do see Firebirds and Novas of the 1970s on the road today, while I have certainly not seen a Dasher in at least the 15 years since I've been paying attention to all the cars I see. Is the German quality really worth that huge premium, if they don't seem to last any longer overall?

1980 Volkswagen Dasher Diesel

But this is indeed a Volkswagen Dasher, which was sold in the US from 1974 to 1981. I can't possibly determine what year this car is based on the rear end alone. Maybe I had a fortunate guess in the first place, since the taillights of the wagon share no styling resemblance with those of the sedan.

I'll credit the excellent Consumer Guide car book of the 1970s (the entire collection spans the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s as well) for jogging my memory. The whole collection is amazing, but the 1940s book is hard to find, and the 1930s book is downright rare (and correspondingly expensive). Buy all those books if you can find them, as they rank among the best resources for car aficionados in the US.

Name that Car #3: Ice Station Zebra (1968)

This is a very underrated action movie. The scenes in the sub are rather terrifying. I really like Rock Hudson in this role. I think Patrick McGoohan also did a fantastic job. I also like the cars.

The Marines arrive

The first tenth of the movie takes place in the United Kingdom, at a US submarine base. US Marines are quickly mustered as part of a very hush-hush rescue operation in the Arctic. They are carried to the base in trucks that are obviously not of local manufacture.

1965 Ford F-100

It's clearly visible that these are Ford trucks with the spaced-out F O R D lettering across the grill. The general shape of the truck leads us into the 1961-1966 fourth generation. The fact that the amber turn signals are mounted co-linearly with the Ford lettering means that it must be 1965-1966, and the fact that it uses the simple eggcrate grill rather than the more overwrought later grill makes it pretty definitively a 1965 Ford F-100. If this movie were not made in 1968, leaving no doubt that the trucks can be identified by grill trim, then it would be a lot harder to establish the provenance of these trucks. On older trucks (even moreso than cars), grills are often swapped for adjacent model years by the restorers to fit with their own tastes or what parts are available. The military versions obviously use painted trim rather than chrome on the grill, but the details are all still there to find out.

Jones's escort vehicle

Right after the convoy pulls away, a poncy British luxury car pops up. Keen eyes will notice that it's an obviously Bentley grill, but identifying it from the front-end only is very difficult. If there were any questions that it's a Bentley, the winged B logo can be seen clearly in an earlier scene.

Even in the 1960s, Rolls-Royce and Bentley still often allowed customers to purchase rolling chassis whose bodywork would be built up by outside coachbuilders. However, by the late 1940s RR-Bentley were also employing John Polwhele Blatchley to design in-house bodywork designs. With a separate chassis, the coachbuilders had a free hand in where to make the door hinges, and Blatchley's "standard steel sports saloon" design for the Bentley Mark VI chose to have suicide front doors (with hinges at the rear) and conventional rear doors (hinges at the front). So too does the car in this movie. But the same could also be said about the R Type, its successor.

From the rear...

The rear shots of the car while driving through the countryside are what shows that it must be a Mark VI and not the later R Type: the rather stubby boot. The distinguishing feature between the R Type and earlier Mark VI was that the former had a much longer boot. The fact that the Mark VI was over twice as common on British roads also makes it a more obvious choice to put in the film.

Bentley didn't do distinct model years (far too American and vulgar) so it's not straightforward to distinguish between the earliest 1946 Mark VIs and the latest from 1952; this car, by my estimation, could come from anywhere in that timeframe.

...the difference is clear. Bentley Mark VI for sure.

Name that Car #2: The Big Sleep (1946)

Marlowe's car in the film

Ah, this is a great film. One of the exemplars of the film noir genre. This is one of several high-quality Bogart/Bacall pictures by Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Bogie is at his smoothest and cleverest. I loved the character of Philip Marlowe and the fact that he drove around in the same car throughout the movie meant that it was begging to be named. The car itself was not called upon to do any dangerous chases, and towards the end of the movie he lets air out of one of his own tires as an excuse to request help from the auto shop which is a front for more sinister operations.

Marlowe doesn't ask for any money from the General above his "$25 a day plus expenses". A working man's car suits a working man's wage. It's clearly a 1938 Plymouth coupe. In 1946, most Americans still had prewar cars, and the last ones had been built in very early 1942. By 1949, most of these had been replaced with new cars. Still, the expansion of the market was inexhaustible, and demand kept outpacing supply until about 1954, when the Ford-Chevy price war resulted in record sales for both, and started pushing the independents out of business.

A beautifully preserved '38 Plymouth

An additional fun fact- the car wasn't the only old thing about the movie when it was released. Filming on The Big Sleep was actually completed early in 1945, but it lay on a shelf until Warner Bros. finished releasing its backlog of war-related films, since these were assumed to have a dwindling shelf life, while The Big Sleep was not time-sensitive. The wartime scenery includes a "B" fuel ration window sticker on Marlowe's Plymouth. This entitled him to a whopping eight gallons of gasoline per week!

Spot the sticker

Name that Car #1: Driver (PS1, 1999)

Welcome to the "Name that Car" feature, where I attempt to provide a solid identification of an interesting or well-known car in film, video games, or other visual media.

It's 1999. If you're a cool kid, you have a PlayStation. I wasn't a cool kid and I had a Nintendo 64. Just between Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, I probably had more fun than the cool kids. But that's a subject left for another article.

Driver was a very popular PS-1 game released in 1999. I got to play just a bit of it on my brother's PlayStation. The general idea is that you were a getaway driver for various criminals and you had to start off by proving your driving skills. The rest of the game seemed to involve escaping from cops, keeping your "felony level" down, not wrecking your ride too much, meeting time deadlines, and blah blah blah... Grand Theft Auto III would become so enormously popular two years later that we already fully know how this kind of game operates.

But unlike in GTA, you couldn't pick your ride. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's not about the car, it's about the driver! So to show how awesome you are, you get to tool around in what looks like a lousy Malaise-mobile. Let's take a few looks at it.

Based on the general order of the back end I'm going to start with 70s Buick. If the front end didn't have dual headlights, I would say it's a perfect 1975-1979 Buick Skylark coupe. The side profile is simple, just a straight line running across with a curved roofline going backwards to a fairly stubby trunk. This points me in the direction of the GM X-body from the mid-to-late 1970s, something shared with the Chevy Nova, Pontiac Ventura, and Oldsmobile Omega. Only the Buick has that characteristic slatted grill treatment. Still, the dual headlights are quite clearly present, which disqualifies that prediction. We have to find a closest match!

The Buick Regals from 1973-1977 also have the grill treatment we're looking for, while they do have the vestigial inside lights that match the square shape of the Driver car. From the front it's a dead ringer. The back end is not quite as pinched with the bumper not quite as high, but let's chalk it up to artistic exaggeration on the part of the game designers. From the side, it looks like the Driver car is too stubby to be a longer pre-1977 Buick, but this isn't carried over to other views of the car which incorporate a partial angle. With few polygons to play with, the swoopy profile of the Regal might have been mashed a bit for that side view. I'm going with a 1975 Buick Regal black coupe, final answer.

It really helps to see these two images, for comparison. Got a better idea than me? Feel free to mention it in the comments.