Rebadging

Meandering on a meaningless topic.

The automobile industry is unique in its nearly universal rejection of rebadging. Every other industry has anonymous manufacturers who turn out the same product with different labels for different stores. It’s especially dominant in appliances and packaged food.

At first there were a FEW anonymous rebranders in autos. The more obscure “manufacturers” in smaller cities sometimes distributed and relabeled generic cars made by one or two anonymous companies.

The “assemblers” were not pure rebadgers. “Assemblers” made their own chassis and sometimes bodies, bought everything else, and assembled and checked the cars in their own factories.

The “majors” made their own chassis and sometimes bodies and usually engines. In some periods the biggies claimed to make all their own components. Ford was serious about the claim, with its own iron mines and its own hardwood forests. Most of the time the line between “assemblers” and “majors” was fuzzy at best.

Auto brands nearly always have deep differences. The surface of Plymouth and Dodge, or the surface of Ford and Mercury, often looked similar, but the engines and chassis were distinct.

Simple rebadging returned after WW2 in two areas.

Canadian trucks were sometimes fully relabeled. Ford made Mercury, Dodge made Fargo, Chevy made Maple Leaf. Ford/Mercury and Dodge/Fargo had some trim differences at first then retreated to nothing but the label.

Kaiser and Frazer had a different grille and nothing else, much closer to rebadging than anything ever done by the big three.

The first absolute rebadging inside USA was the Nash/Hudson Rambler and the Nash/Hudson Metropolitan, from ’54 to ’57. Only the nameplate differed.