<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"It seems like yesterday, as the song says, but it was long ago. I was crouched in my garage, running a piece of dental floss back and forth between the Silver Arrow paint of a 4000-mile Mercedes CL55 AMG and the plasti-chrome badge that denoted it as such. Oh, how I swore under my breath! How I grumbled to a nonexistent audience! How I felt sorry for myself! I should explain. A business partner of mine had taken delivery of the pressurized, classically pillarless coupe a few days prior. It was common for us to swap cars for extended periods of time, which meant that, at some point in the near future, I&amp;#039;d have the car for months or even years. A free $130,000, 469-hp coupe, with insurance and even fuel provided by the company. The fly in the ointment was my partner&amp;#039;s stubborn insistence that the badges come off. Every car he&amp;#039;d driven, from his Andial-boosted Porsche Turbo Targas and cabriolets of the 1980s, to the Ronin-spec Audi S8 and GMC Sierra that would be the AMG&amp;#039;s garage-mates, was shorn of identifying information. I used to think it was his one concession to modesty; a linebacker-sized fellow with a startling resemblance to Ving Rhames, he wore canary-yellow tracksuits and once bought a purple S-Class sedan. &amp;quot;Do you pull the badges off the cars because they do it in Europe or because you just don&amp;#039;t feel like bragging about having the top-spec version of a car?&amp;quot; I asked. READ THIS: Clueless dealers do the Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ no favors &amp;quot;Nah,&amp;quot; he drawled, &amp;quot;I want those [insensitive term for other human beings] to have to guess how I roll. Let &amp;#039;em guess.&amp;quot; Fair enough. But at the tender age of 30 or so, I didn&amp;#039;t want anybody to guess whether I had a pre-owned, bargain-basement CL500 or a spanking-new CL55 AMG. I wanted it to be spelled out on the car&amp;#039;s trunk, sides, and nose. And possibly the roof, just in case I was driving by some hotties standing on an apartment balcony. &amp;quot;We could leave the badges on the AMG,&amp;quot; I suggested. &amp;quot;While the foot-long &amp;#039;V8 Kompressor&amp;#039; on the side is a bit crass, it&amp;#039;s attractive in its own way\u2014&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You can do the floss,&amp;quot; he cut me off, &amp;quot;or I can do it. But it&amp;#039;s gonna get done.&amp;quot; And so I found myself cutting each letter of &amp;quot;Kompressor&amp;quot; off each door in the dead of night before firing up the big Benz and exercising my annoyance on a stretch of rural two-lane, dropping the hammer at 50 mph with traction control off, grinning as the wheels spun on the cold road. Power speaks for itself, even without a badge.  But why have the badge in the first place? Why have &amp;quot;CL55&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Biarritz&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Paseo&amp;quot; back there at all? Does anybody really need to know that you&amp;#039;re driving an Optima and not a Forte? Perhaps it&amp;#039;s just to show off to the neighbors\u2014 but if that&amp;#039;s the case, why does the Chevy Spark come with a badge? To rub it in someone else&amp;#039;s face that you aren&amp;#039;t walking? After a few years spent selling cars in the 1990s, I came to the rather cynical conclusion that most badging is to help salespeople who, given the chance, would cheerfully mistake a Tempo for a Taurus, or even a Thunderbird. The average man on the sales floor cares so little about cars that it isn&amp;#039;t enough to have the model name on the decklid. It must be somewhere on the dashboard and perhaps also on the instrument panel or the inside of the windshield, just to make sure that he doesn&amp;#039;t confuse a Focus with an F-650. But what about what I call the &amp;quot;tech-of-the-week&amp;quot; badges? Remember how Accords of the 1970s proclaimed &amp;quot;5-Speed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Hondamatic?&amp;quot; What was the point of that? READ THIS: Of midgets and men Those particular badges, I think, are for car companies to show off to other car companies. Ha-ha, Chevrolet: Our Accord has a five-speed, compared with your pathetically quad-geared Cavalier Type 10. Guess what, Nissan! We now have double overhead cams in the Corolla GT-S, so deal with it! Viewed in this light, it&amp;#039;s downright tragic that Lincoln backed away from calling its version of Ford&amp;#039;s EcoBoost V6 the &amp;quot;TwinForce.&amp;quot; Doesn&amp;#039;t EcoBoost seem a little meek next to the bloody-fisted statement of intent that is TwinForce? And you just know it would have had a hell of a badge on there. The current poverty chic of our reduced-expectation post-millennium economy might offer a clue as to why Lincoln bailed. It certainly explains the proliferation of sad little cloisonn\u00E9s you now see on the freeway: Hybrid Synergy Drive. Xtronic CVT. SFE. Malibu Eco, which sounds like a carbon-neutral resort. I don&amp;#039;t want any of it. I want foot-long Kompressor badges, vacuum-molded statements of intimidation. 505HP. Turbo S. Superleggera. SHO. AMG. The hell with mystery. Let&amp;#039;s state our intention in gleaming letters: I aim to misbehave. Stay out of the way. Or not. Let the record show that when I took delivery of an Accord Coupe earlier this month, I broke out the floss and promptly removed the chrome &amp;quot;V6&amp;quot; from the trunk. Then, in perhaps an excess of enthusiasm, I pulled &amp;quot;Accord&amp;quot; as well. I&amp;#039;m older now. I don&amp;#039;t care what the man on the street or the girl on the balcony thinks. I&amp;#039;ll show them a clean trunk and a clean pair of heels. Let &amp;#039;em guess. Jack Baruth is a contributing editor at R&amp;amp;amp;T. He was not on the balcony on the night in question. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a7338/avoidable-contact-naming-right-65-8-roa0514/>