Ever been driving down the road and noticed a car wearing the wrong badges? Or more specifically, a car you’re pretty sure was made by one manufacturer, wearing the badges of another?
Chances are you’ve just spotted the result of badge engineering. This is the name given to the phenomenon of one car being sold by two - or sometimes even three - car makers, each with only very cursory changes to the styling and specification.
Sometimes, it happens when a car maker just wants access to a particular part of the market without having to develop their own entrant. At other times, it might be that two or more manufacturers have worked together to develop a car, joining forces to maximise the economies of scale.
What isn’t quite so well known is that badge-engineered cars can often make great bargains on the second-hand market, particularly when one of the models is far more well-known – and therefore sought-after – than the other.
Take the Suzuki Swace, for example. Maybe you’ve never heard of it, but I’ll bet you’ve heard of the Toyota Corolla. The Swace is simply a rebadged version of a Corolla Touring Sports, or estate.
Now, when people decide they want to seek out a dependable, reliable Corolla Touring Sports, that’s usually what they set out to look for. Rarely do they think to look for a Suzuki Swace instead. And as a result, used values for the Swace are markedly lower.
That means canny buyers who do know about the Swace can often end up getting the same car – and the same high levels of reliability – for much less money.
Take the example I found – a 2022 Swace SZ-T with 32,000 miles on the clock. The CarGurus Instant Market Value for this car is £15,793, yet this car’s on at £14,500, a hefty saving of £1,293.
But that’s not where the savings end, because the equivalent Toyota Corolla’s IMV is is £18,691. So in reality, you’re getting a £4,191 saving by choosing this Swace compared with someone paying full whack for the Toyota.
And it’s not like you’re losing out in other areas with the Suzuki, either. Take the warranty. Any Toyota benefits from up to 10 years’ worth of warranty from its registration date thanks to the company’s service-activated warranty offer.
Suzuki offers a similar warranty, but until recently, this only ran until the car is seven years old. Now, however, Suzuki has upped its offering to match Toyota’s 10 years, and even cars built before the change benefit from the extra time.
If you can live with slightly less warranty, though, then buying badge engineered can also be a brilliant way of getting yourself into a tasty EV. Take the Subaru Solterra. This is another car that can more commonly be found with a Toyota badge on it (and a longer warranty: the Subaru gets just three years, 60,000 miles), as the bZ4X. But choose a bZ4X, and you’ll pay more.
The best-value Solterra I found was a 2022 Touring with 18,000 miles on the clock; it came in at £21,989, a whopping £4,263 less than its CarGurus IMV. By contrast, an equivalent bZ4X will set you back just shy of £23,400.
Then again, you don’t need to spend that much to reap the benefits of buying a badge-engineered car. The Volkswagen Up, for example, is perhaps one of the best-known examples of such a thing: beneath the skin, it’s almost identical to the Skoda Citigo and Seat Mii.
Thanks to its slightly more upmarket positioning, the Up is the priciest of the three, which means that by choosing the Skoda or the Seat, you can get the same car for less.
A 2016 Volkswagen Move Up, for example, is a sweet little car in anyone’s book. And at £4,650 for an example with 71,000 on the clock, you might think you were getting a steal, especially given the one I found is on for £807 less than its IMV.
But hold on, because elsewhere on CarGurus you can find a very smart looking 2015 Citigo SE with almost half the mileage, at 37,000 on the clock. Despite that, it’s on for exactly the same price as the Up, which means it’ll cost you £410 less than its IMV.
That’s the same car, with a very similar specification, for half the cost, just by choosing the one with the Skoda badge on its nose. I don’t know about you, but I might well indulge in a bit of badge engineering of my own.