• by Tanya Gazdik , March 29, 2023

Despite technology like AI, one element of automotive marketing is slow to change: the logo. 

Researchers asked 90 respondents to submit hand-drawn recreations of various car logos without assistance and to the best of their memory. 

Another 503 Americans were surveyed on their opinions of the original car logos for 13 different brands versus the logos for those same brands that were generated using Midjourney AI, an artificial intelligence program.

The survey was commissioned by American Trucks, an online aftermarket truck retailer.

Even though survey respondents were the least confident about their ability to recreate the BMW logo from memory, the German brand's iconic circular logo scored the highest for accuracy.

Respondents received a 5.7 out of 10 for the BMW drawings, while Subaru ranked second at 5.3. Nissan, Ford, and Audi rounded out the top five, with scores of 4.7, 4.6, and 4.1, respectively.

Kia's logo was the least remembered. In fact, 66% of people didn't realize that Kia had changed its logo.

Tesla’s logo is more memorable than Lexus, Toyota and Mercedes despite being created less than two decades ago in 2004.

BMW is 56% more memorable than Mercedes, Ford is 17% more memorable than Chevrolet and Honda is 18% more memorable than Toyota.

More than half (61%) prefer AI-designed logos over originals, People prefer AI-generated Mercedez-Benz logos more than twice as much as the original and two-thirds of people prefer Tesla’s AI version over the original.

The most-popular truck logos are Chevrolet (61.8%), Toyota (60.4%), Ford (60.4%), Nissan (58.7%) and Honda (56.7%).