Hyundai and Kia make some pretty good cars, but they also have a bit of an image problem in North America. From the brands’ bargain-basement roots to the infamous Theta II engine recall, there are sentiments about the brands that won’t simply go away, even with the introduction of fast electric cars. So, what if you want a Hyundai or Kia but are a bit too ashamed to rock the badge? Well, a Korean company named Brenthon has found a solution.
While many tuning companies peddle performance modifications or chunky body kits, Brenthon isn’t bothering with any of that. It’s not here to make cars faster or give them more downforce or reupholster their interiors. Instead, it’s pretty much just here to sell badges. Badges that can turn your Hyundai or Kia into a Brenthon.
It’s a bizarre premise, aftermarket badge-engineering, but it has some legs. The new Hyundai Santa Fe is a brilliant family hauler, the closest thing to the original Volvo XC90 you can buy today. It’s the right size, it’s hugely roomy, the hybrid model is amazingly efficient, yet some people just don’t want to be seen driving a Hyundai. For those people, Brenthon sells bits to rebadge Santa Fes as Brenthon MX5s. Why MX5? Because the chassis code for the current Santa Fe is MX5. Another nerdy little bit of car trivia to keep in your brain.
Or, how about rebadging your previous-generation Palisade as a Brenthon, including a massive wordmark across the liftgate? It’s almost like creating a Grand Theft Auto car in real life. There’s overwhelming familiarity, yet the badges don’t feel real. Like you’re stepping into a parallel universe of sorts.
It’s a similar deal with Brenthon’s EV-specific badges, just with accentuated genericness. A squircle with a strike-through isn’t the most evocative thing on the planet, but given how machines like the Kia EV6 and Niro don’t quite look like anything else on the road, maybe this minimalistic approach works. It’s certainly better than being asked if you drive a “KN”.
My favorite Brenthon badge just says “The New,” which I desperately want to stick on a 1999 Sephia. It’s not advertising speed or prestige, it’s shouting about newness, which immediately becomes hilarious when a model isn’t new anymore. Plus, it turns into a Who’s On First-type bit when you tell your friends you got The New emblem.
Best of all, Brenthon emblems aren’t enormously expensive. You can rebadge an entire Santa Fe for about $120 down to the center caps, which isn’t much money when you think about it. It’s cheaper than getting your windows tinted or your roof wrapped for a splash of contrast. Plus, you can have endless amounts of fun with it. Your neighbors will likely be perplexed or at least mildly confused, and that box for make and model you fill out when you check into a hotel is an opportunity to be a bit cheeky. Plus, could you imagine if something with these badges ends up in a pursuit or something? “Suspect is driving a … Brenthon?”
Brenthon is an exceptionally strange concept, but it’s one worth keeping an eye on. I haven’t seen this level of professionalism applied to aftermarket rebranding before, and who knows? Maybe you’ll spot a Brenthon yourself.
Top graphic image: Brenthon
I see the point of a less obviously cheap badge, but I personally don’t get it. I do sort of get badges for home market vehicles like rebadging a Jetta as a Bora or a Lexus IS as an Altezza. It was the same with early Sprinter vans. You could buy a Mercedes badge kit for your Dodge.
I low key want Fiat Doblo badges for a Ram Promaster City, or really blow minds with Toyota Pro Ace badges
I first read “Benthon” as “benthic” and thought “actually, they DO look like fish that live at the bottom of the ocean”
I’d like alternative badges for cars with shit logos, not re-badges as they’d be the same name, just better designs. Pretty much any of the cheap chrome letter-in-a-circle marques would be a good place to start. And the Chevy bowtie, which I hate, especially in vending machine toy gold.
‘Gold-coloured-plastic’ is currently America’s national colour.
Plastic?! I’ll have you know that’s architectural grade extruded polystyrene
I wound up looking up Brenthon several years ago when I owned a Chevy Prizm. The main grille badge had fallen apart, and I was thinking about rebadging that. My candidates included Tigris (which I guess is a Brenthon brand as well?), Baojun (for the horse design), Shacman (for the “S” logo), Chery (for the Star Trek Federation-style logo) and a couple others.
Brenthon does have in their wares parts to fit my current Ford Escape…but I think by the time I pull the trigger, that car might fall apart on me.
This company might have done kick-ass business if they’d advertised during the peak of the Kia Boyz nonsense.
I have recently (before this article) been thinking about rebadging my next car. If I could at reasonable cost get something custom that would look up to OEM quality. Like “CAR” or “VEHICLE” in the usual modern horizontally expanded geometrics, or maybe “Automobile” in 50s-style streamline script.
If your name happens to be Ben North, you could rearrange the letters and really personalize the car.
“the infamous Theta II engine recall”
Hyundai is run by Scientologists? Who knew?
I would definitely do this. That H logo is so ugly. I de-badge my cars (and cameras) anyway, but some of the badges can’t be removed without leaving an obvious mounting bump.
I wonder if parking tickets in towns where they still fill them out by hand would be defective and dismissed. A friend in NYC had an old Ford pickup with a Dodge bed after id got rear-ended, and that’s what was on offer at the junkyard. The cops in patrol cars that would drive up and issue a ticket without getting out of the car would see DODGE on the tailgate and write that on the ticket. He’d take the tickets that came in the mail to the Judge, who would toss them.
I also take the branding off my clothing if I can.
Bravo. I also have a vehicle with no words or logos on the outside. It gets compliments, and it’s not a vehicle that generally gets appearance compliments.
Likewise with the clothing, and I blacked out the non-functional writing on my camera, too. And the strap.
I wonder if my Geo Tracker with junkyard Suzuki badges gives me any parking ticket immunity. To the casual observer, it now appears to be a Suzuki Tracker, which isn’t even a real car. (Though there were a ton of foreign badge jobs, so I could be wrong)
It is always fun looking up stuff about it, and trying to figure out which of the many brands and models I should input to get the best results.
For my college parking pass, I had to tell them it was a Chevrolet Tracker, which is only half right, but the closest I could get
You’re ashamed to drive a Hyundai yet you’re willing to tell people that you drive a Hyundai with a Brenthon badge because you’re ashamed to drive a Hyundai. Vanity is fun.
I think it’d be more embarrassing for the image conscious. When someone asks what a “Brenthon” is, because they’ve never heard of such a thing, how do you respond with anything but “its actually a Hyundai”? Just drive your Hyundai and not draw any extra attention if you are embarrassed.
Seriously, how is making your Hyundai look like a knockoff of a Hyundai built by some small company no one has ever heard of somehow better than a Hyundai? Like, if people have a problem with Hyundai, they’re really not going to like an unauthorized copy of a Hyundai that someone threw together out of counterfeit parts
I don’t know, it seems like the market for this is just going to buy a $10k Mercedes GLE with 130k on it instead until it bankrupts or strands them.
Or a 15 year old S-Class with failed air suspension and yellowed headlights
What’s A Brenthon?
It’s a Brenthon!
Rinse, repeat.
Right. I’m not a fan of de-badging, but even that would be more sensible.
Reminds me of all the different badges Toyota uses on its cars in its home market. Weirdly, they tend to use the global corporate logo on the rear, but the front will often have a model-specific badge.
But sometimes not! The strangest example of the global corporate logo being on both front and back is the s200 Crown Majesta. So the top-of-the-line Crown gets the standard Toyota logo front and back, while the “lesser” Crowns get the model-specific Crown logo on the front. Why?
I’d love an article on this topic sometime, Autopian!
American companies used to do that for certain models, too – especially personal luxury coupes – Cougar, Thunderbird, Monte Carlo, Toronado, Riviera, Reatta, Trofeo, Cordoba.
Also sports models, the Corvette has one right now, as did the Viper. Hell, even the Fiero had its own
Ha! Never thought about that but of course The Mustang has its own badge too. I don’t live in the States though so I guess I’m less familiar with the other times this was done. I wonder if Japanese manufacturers were inspired by this practice in the US and have just kept running with it to this day.
Possibly, it seems like the Japanese cars that are most likely to have it are the somewhat brougham-y luxury oriented models, plus sports cars, pretty much the same categories as with US automakers
Actually you’ll find it even on pretty run-of -the mill cars there. You’ll see it on Corollas (Axio and Fielder), people movers (Noah, Voxy, Esquire – 3 identical cars but with different exteriors, another JDM quirk) as well as the more expected premium cars like Mark X, Crown and Alphard/Vellfire. Interestingly they phased it out for the current-gen Harrier premium/luxury SUV though.
Read somewhere years ago that they have several sales/marketing channels with their own dealerships, which have their own variations on the Corolla, for example. A branding thing.
They have Toyota Store, Netz Store, Toyopet Store, and Toyota Corolla Store – but all the vehicles sold through them are branded as Toyotas, the individual sales channel names are just the name of the dealership retail franchise, not the products they sell. At one time, there was some attempt to give each channel some sort of distinct market position (focusing on small cars, focusing on selling to youth, focusing on commercial vehicles, etc), but that has been abandoned for some time and they now all sell identical model lines, every Toyota is available from every store. The main purpose now seems to be to cram in as many sales outlets into a territory as possible without violating anyone else’s existing franchise agreement
Ok, old news/branding exercises then.
Edit. The Will Vi was a quarter century ago? I feel old.
We don’t need no stinking badgers!
Today, we’re teaching poodles how to fly!
“Plus, could you imagine if something with these badges ends up in a pursuit or something? “Suspect is driving a … Brenthon?””
Ha, in 1991 Hyundai had a TV commercial featuring a Hyundai Sonata V6 as a police car chasing a BMW 735iL where at the end the perp breaks the fourth wall in astonishment when he spots the emblem on the trunk while being arrested. But the commercial received criticism on account of the timing being right after what happened with Rodney King and the LAPD so it didn’t run for very long at all; in fact, IIRC, it aired only a handful of times. However, the expression on the perp’s face was memorable, hence me still remembering it decades later, lol.
https://youtu.be/0Jm394bu6W0?si=eI3J2MuWgsWVMI6p
That was a fun little ad!
Sooooo you don’t want to be seen driving what is obvious to anyone with eyeballs, a Hyundai. So you rebadge it with fake branding so that when someone says “what the fuck is a Brenthon?” and googles it, they find you have rebadged your Hyundai because you’re embarrassed of your Hyundai???
I… have nothing good to say about this.
Some more ideas:
BMW = WOW
Mercedes = Casino Monte Carlo (in celebration of the slot machine interior screen aesthetic)
Toyota = Moonbasin
VW = Fume
Wow, thats dumb
Being car-focused at an early age, I would ask my dad, “What kind of car is that?” as we rode around. One day, I asked the question and he replied, “A Pissaire DeLuxe.” On a later ride with my mom present, I proudly pointed to a befinned Dodge and said, “Look mom- a Pissaire DeLuxe!” Needless to say, my dad didn’t make up automotive makes and models after that.
Since some embarrassed Tesla owners have been slapping other manufacturer’s logos on their cars, Brenthon should release kits for the Model 3 and Model Y.
I spoke to a women who called a Porsche Cayman a Tesla the other day. Weird world.
Cayman is definitely a stretch. I do, however, often observe normies refer to all EVs as Teslas.
A friend of mine took the Honda “H” badge that fell off of her old Odyssey and it covered up the rear badge on her Tesla perfectly.
Well, a large part of Tesla’s revenue is (or at least was at one point) from selling carbon credits to other automakers. So it would be somewhat fitting to rebrand a Tesla as oh, idk, a Dodge Hellcat.
Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger
Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger Badger
Mushroom, mushroom
SNAAAAKE!
I love these! It is not a broken Lagonda this time, it is a broken Brenthon, yes I know that you said you would charge me next time but this a whole new car!
Maybe the “The New” badge is just letting fellow motorists know the driver’s favorite track from Interpol’s first album.
Brenthon could be mistaken for something Chinese trying to sound European. Although cryptic emblems could be fun, the fact that there is an armada of chinese brands trying to enter the west takes all the fun out. Jaecoo, Omoda, Voyah, Skywell…
There was something similar years ago with the Hyundai Coupe/Tiburon? Badge-tuning with some quasi-italian crap. Tuscani maybe? Which sounds stupid.
Imagine being so insecure that you feel the need to put aftermarket badges on your car so you don’t have to be seen in a Hyundai or Kia. I guess doing this is cheaper than therapy?
I’m always impressed (disappointed) at the number of used stingers that have been badge swapped. Usually for that weird E logo or the stinger script.
I daily a Hyundai that roasts tires and makes fart noises and I’ve literally never felt self-conscious. My car is a rolling shitpost. I almost certainly am better off than the type of customers people (not always correctly) usually associate with the brand but why should I care?
I’m a grown ass man. A person making assumptions about me based on my car probably isn’t someone I’d want to be friends with anyway. Really the only thing that bugs me about my car is the fact that absolutely no one has any idea what it is and trying to explain it just confuses people more…but I signed up for that and it was the same when I had a GTI anyway.
I’d rather have a car that draws no attention than a car that draws a lot of attention, and I assume most of the commentariat would agree.
This guy gets it.
These needs brought up every time people complain about full-size truck drivers. It’s all so dumb, drive what works for you.
That E is at least the actual badge used on the South Korean domestic market
The stinger script on the back is standard on 2020 and later models. Some people replace that with a blockier typeface.
I’m happily seen in either of the weirdo cars in my garage: a red 2020 Kia Soul GT-Line turbo (with a white roof we added for extra panache), or a gray 2023 Hyundai Santa Cruz Night edition, pretty much factory except for a few random stickers.
I guess part of that is that I can afford (reasonably, as new Bentleys are well out of reach) any car I want and my wife wanted the Kia and I wanted the Hyundai. And we’re happy with them.
I love mine. 3.5 years in and the only hiccup so far was a bad knock sensor, which is a known issue on the early Ns that they’ve since fixed. It was replaced under warranty and cost me nothing. It’s a fun and deceptively practical car, although I’ll need something bigger once baby 2 is in the picture. Might fuck around and get a GV60 Magma tbh.
I’ve got at least 7 more years of ownership planned for my Santa Cruz. It’s also quite fun and very practical. The Magmas sure look interesting and will be under consideration when I’m ready.
Especially if that green wagon is in play.
Back around 1990 I helped a guy with his broken Subaru that had 4WD badges yet was clearly missing a rear dif. When I asked him if he realized this (assuming he had bought the car used from an unscrupulous person) he sheepishly admitted to having put the badges on himself.
To this day I still have no idea who he thought he’d be impressing with a 4WD Subaru.
I knew a guy who put M badges and (probably fake) Alpina wheels on his BMW.
You can already guess what his personality was like can’t you?
I know he never uses turn signals and definitely doesn’t have a clean driving record
Exactly the same as the guy I knew who put a blow molded faux mobile phone in his second hand Mazda, wore fake eyeglasses to look smarter and told everyone he went to an expensive private college when in reality he was attending a public city college.
He’s the guy who whenever he’s invited to an event will make a big show of coming, you can COUNT on him but will inevitably not show up, later citing *REASONS!* time after time.
Of course he ended up rich, married to a smoking hot, gorgeous wife and owning a big house with a Lamborghini in the driveway and each kid receiving a brand new Mercedes for their 16th. His entire life is highly detailed on Facebook with many humblebrag thanks and blessings.
Maybe he’s the unscrupulous person selling it?
Caveat emptor
I had a 1999 S10 2WD. Someone down the street got the same truck a few months later. A couple weeks after he bought it, he put 4×4 stickers on the side. I could tell just driving by that it was actually 2WD because it had the same 5 bolt wheels mine did, which were only available on the 2WD trucks because the 4WD ones had 6 bolt wheels.
Its the same lifehack as putting gold plated Lexus emblems on a rusty Tercel.
Call it what you will but it’s no Eshelman:
https://live.staticflickr.com/8529/8586161443_4b5239c240_b.jpg
Dear Editorial Staff: now that needs a story.
GM could play a cruel April Fool’s joke by announcing they’re reviving an old brand then releasing badge kits like this for existing vehicles.
And yet there’d be a huge amount of people happily rebadging their Camaros as Firebirds I’d bet.
That’s the cruel part. The Camaro is not an existing vehicle.
In before the inevitable “It’s an upbadge” and “such a downbadge” war begins. Neat and funny concept though! I bet there’s a legitimate business case to buy a bunch of the “The New” badges in bulk and add them to random appliances and resell them on Marketplace.
Smells like upbadge in here.
not much, yo- …wait a minute