Lots of car makers use animals for their logos, and quite often, they make perfect sense. Horses are powerful and elegant, like Ferraris often are; bulls are big and angry like Lamborghinis; and Jaguar… well, it would have been weird if it used anything else for its logo, wouldn’t it?
There’s one animal logo that’s always seemed a bit incongruous, though – the Peugeot lion. The things we associate lions with – strength, ferocity and, erm, majestic manes – aren’t necessarily attributes often found in Peugeot’s cars, even its sportiest models. And lions, as far as we know, are not native to France.
Current Peugeot logo
So how did this big, angry cat find its way onto the noses of small, friendly cars like the 208? Well, as anyone who’s watched that one episode of Top Gear knows, Peugeot has made lots of things besides cars over the years. In fact, the Peugeot business got started way back in 1810, operating a steel mill.
Among the many products it made were saws, and Emile Peugeot – the man who’d set up the foundry – wanted a symbol to represent the strength of his sawblades as well as the ease with which they’d bite through whatever needed sawing. His answer? A squirrel. No, wait, sorry – a lion. For a little extra synergy, the coat of arms of Franche-Comté, the region of France where Peugeot was founded, also features a lion, rearing up on its hind legs. Sound familiar?
Original Peugeot logo
Peugeot first started engraving the lion on its sawblades not long after it got started, but it wouldn’t become the company’s official, trademarked logo until 1858. It was quite different to the logos we’re more familiar with now, too, with the lion on all fours, walking along an arrow.
This emblem first found its way onto Peugeot’s cars in 1907, while in the 1930s and ’40s, they featured a sculpted lion’s head bonnet mascot. It wasn’t until 1948 that the company adopted the more familiar logo of the lion rearing up and roaring, borrowing its look from the Franche-Comté coat of arms.
Previous Peugeot logo
In the ’60s, some Peugeots started using yet another logo, featuring just a lion’s head in profile, but by the ’70s, it had largely fallen out of use again in favour of the more familiar lion bearing its claws. However, in 2021, Peugeot, like lots of other European companies around the time, sought to adopt a more minimalist image as well as reconnect with their heritage. The result was a move back to a redesigned version of the lion head logo, sitting on a shield as it had in the 1960s – and that’s the emblem the company has used since.
So, if you wind up at a particularly geeky pub quiz and get asked why Peugeot uses a lion as its logo, now you know – because of saws.
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