For some reason, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately. I am, to be clear, perfectly happy with my stupid little Alien Green Kia Soul– it is a comfortable drive and the car is reliable and gets me where I want to go. I’ve had to replace the tires and the battery since buying it, as well as some brake work if I remember correctly, but nothing that doesn’t fall squarely under routine and expected maintenance, although I suppose I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of warning that the battery was about to shit out on me.

The plan has always been to hold on to this car until my son is old enough to drive and then to give it to him. He’s 12, so that’s still four years off, and I feel confident that the car still has a good 8 to 10 years left in it at least, assuming that everything doesn’t suddenly fall apart at once. So I am not in any meaningful way in the market for a new car right now, and that’s not going to change, absent some sort of disaster that requires me to get a new car.

Anyway, point is, at the moment all of this is purely theoretical. However, I find, the more that I think about it, that I really want my next car to be a Nice Car. And in looking around and trying to decide on what I mean by “Nice Car,” I’m discovering that most of what I find myself idly looking at ends up around the $45-55K range.

My current car cost me $16000 and is the most expensive vehicle I’ve ever owned. So this would represent a bit of an upgrade. I’m literally considering going from a Kia to a Lexus or a Mercedes.

Will I be able to afford it? Maybe. It’s gonna depend on how good I can be with my money once I murder all of my non-mortgage debt during this school year, which– again, knock on wood, absent any disasters– feels pretty thoroughly doable, especially now that I’m getting paid for this overload.

(My first post-overload check is tomorrow. Am I excited? Hell yes.)

So, he said, having taken six paragraphs to get to the fucking point, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot, and I’ve been paying closer attention to the cars I’ve been driving past while I’ve been on the road, and just kind of noticing what I notice, if that makes any sense and I hope it does.

And in the process I’ve been wondering about car logos. How many of these do you recognize?

Some of them have words in them, of course– you’re not going to screw up Ford or Volvo’s logos, and some of them have pretty clear letters in them, although the H in the Hyundai logo is pretty stylized, and the L in Lexus’ logo in the featured photo could probably be mistaken for an ordinary acute angle. But at least half of those don’t have any clear connection to the name of the company they represent.

The point: Why do car companies use logos like this, and — to my knowledge at least, and I’m willing to be proven wrong — no other category of corporation that I can think of? I mean:

With only a very few exceptions– Windows and Shell, and Shell’s icon is a shell— there’s damn near nothing on there that doesn’t have at least some text in it. Computer companies, maybe might be more likely to use abstract logos, but not as rigorously as car companies do. So what’s the deal here? Why are car companies, specifically, so likely to use such abstract logos? I mean, every company has a story behind their logo, and I admit I didn’t notice the T in the Toyota logo until reading about it today, but I can’t find any reason why cars and more or less only cars tend to use wizard sigils instead of readable logos like a sensible company.

I need a historian of marketing. Help me out here.