It's time for car companies to dump this terrible design trend

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Mercedes Benz GLC 26

Hollis Johnson

We've got big badges.

Cars have certainly been ornate in the past. One need look no further than the sumptuous hand-built luxury coaches of the early 20th century or the exuberant 1950s fantasias that came from Detroit for confirmation of that.

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At the moment, however, we're in a bit of a cookie-cutter episode. Not quite as same-old-same-old as the mid-to-late 1990s, when everything seemed to aspire to the condition of Lexus, or the mid-2000s when Audis were widely visually emulated.

For the most part, however, a compact sedan looks like a compact sedan, a big SUV looks like a big SUV, and all the mid-size crossovers look the same.

This has led to our current moment, with car designers added swoops and cut-ins and vents to jazz up what is effectively a rectangle with wheels at the four corners. Beyond that, there's the badging.

Badges used to be fairly modest affairs. Even flamboyant brands, such as Cadillac, kept their ornate badges small.

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That changed about a decade ago. I'm not sure who the first "big badge" offender was, so I'll go with the easiest obvious target: Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes used to be OK with a hood ornament, the three-pointed "star badge," that was about as big as a silver dollar. But then the badge became more prominent on the grille - and became as big as a Frisbee.

Other automakers followed, and a trend was born.

It is a trend that needs to go away.