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!