Author name: Car Logos

DR is the car brand Massimo Di Risio launched in 2006 in Macchia d’Isernia, Molise. Its logo is a pair of lowercase initials, and its cars lean on Chinese partners such as Chery.

The DMC badge stands for DeLorean Motor Company, a 1975 venture that built fewer than 9,000 stainless steel cars in Northern Ireland. Here is how the letters outlived the factory.

Holden began as an Adelaide saddlery in 1856 and became Australia’s own carmaker. Here is the story of its lion and stone badge, designed by Rayner Hoff and first used in 1928.

Founded by John and Hope Hennessey in 1991, the Texas company signs its cars with a red script wordmark and a sharply cut, symmetrical H.

SSC North America, formerly Shelby SuperCars, puts founder Jerod Shelby’s family crest on its hypercars. Here is what the shield, the motto and the 2018 logo update mean.

Carroll Shelby came up with the Cobra name in a dream. Peter Brock drew the first round badge in the early 1960s and John Chun redrew it as the coiled, striking cobra still used today.

ZIL started in 1916 as AMO, a Moscow truck plant built for a wartime army order. It became ZIS, then ZIL, and built both the ZIL-130 truck and Kremlin limousines.

ZAZ grew out of an 1863 farm-machinery workshop in Zaporizhzhia and built its first car, the Zaporozhets, in 1960. Its badge went from a red star to a dam to a silver shield.

Zagato calls its badge the lightning Z. It belongs to the Milan coachbuilder Ugo Zagato founded in 1919, after building fighter planes in the First World War.

Wiesmann picked a gecko as its logo because the founders wanted a car that stuck to the road almost against the laws of physics. They later built a factory in the same shape.