Aston Martin sued its own 17% shareholder for copying its 98-year-old wings — a court ruled nobody owns a winged badge.

A badge is the cheapest thing a car company makes and the only thing it truly sells. Aston Martin has worn a pair of outstretched wings since the late 1920s — close to a century of one gesture, refined but never abandoned, the single mark that lets a £200,000 car be recognised at a glance and a distance. So when a Chinese-owned electric black-cab maker filed to register a logo of its own — a horse's head sitting inside a tier of wings — Aston Martin did the thing a brand is supposed to do: it opposed the application and went to defend the emblem.

Then the case turned into the most awkward branding fight in the industry. The maker on the other side of the table was Geely's London EV Company (LEVC), the firm that builds London's electric taxis. And Geely is not a stranger to Aston Martin. It is one of its largest shareholders, holding a stake of around 17 percent. Aston Martin spent the year suing a company that part-owns it, over the right to a pair of wings.

The court said the wings aren't yours

In the first round, the UK Intellectual Property Office tribunal ruled against Aston Martin. The reasoning is the part every design chief should read twice. First, buyers were "unlikely to mistake an electric black cab for an Aston Martin sports car" — the two products live so far apart that no shopper confuses one badge for the other. Second, and far more damaging to the idea of owning a shape: winged badges are everywhere. The tribunal pointed at Bentley and Mini, both wearing wings, as proof that the gesture is common property of the car business, not Aston Martin's private signature. Aston Martin was ordered to pay Geely £2,200 in costs.

That is the quiet bombshell. A brand can spend ninety-eight years teaching the world to read a mark as theirs — and a court can decide, in an afternoon, that the world reads it as a category, not a name. Wings say "car," "speed," "Britishness," "premium." They do not, legally, say "Aston Martin." The emblem the whole identity rests on turns out to be a rented gesture the company never owned outright.

Aston Martin filed its appeal in London in April 2026, three years after the first decision and in the same era Geely was building its stake. Geely, for its part, waved the whole thing off as "a routine legal process in trademark confirmation" — not, in its words, an "unusual or hostile 'legal battle.'" Which is its own kind of statement: the part-owner is relaxed because it expects to win, again.

The redesign that didn't change the problem

Here is the cruel timing. In July 2022 — the same window Geely was filing its applications — Aston Martin unveiled a refreshed wings badge by the graphic designer Peter Saville, who had earlier said the old mark looked "a little bit mid-century." The redesign was sold as "subtle but necessary," a tidied, edgier set of wings for the electric era. Some called the result toy-like; the louder point is that a brand refresh, however well executed, does nothing to settle the question the court actually asked. You can redraw your wings all you like. If wings as a class belong to the category, a sharper pair of them is still a sharper pair of category wings — more beautiful, no more ownable.

So the real decision was never "how should our wings look." It was "what does this mark mean when it sits two inches from a near-identical one, in the one context our studio never renders." The studio renders the badge alone: centred on a clean grille, lit, in the colour and the lockup the brand controls completely. It does not render the badge in the context where its value is actually decided — beside the LEVC mark in a trademark filing, on a register where an examiner compares silhouettes, in a courtroom where "is this distinctive?" is the only question that pays. The emblem looks unmistakably yours in every frame your team composes, and contestable in the one frame a tribunal composes.

Where design intelligence sits

This is the gap a parallel design team is built to close. The job is not to make the wings prettier — Saville already did that. The job is to judge the mark in every context it will actually live in: alone on the grille, and shoulder-to-shoulder with the lookalike, and shrunk to a favicon, and read by a trademark examiner who has Bentley and Mini open in another tab. Design intelligence is staging the badge in the contested state — the comparison the court will run, before the court runs it — as evidence a CEO and a design chief can actually look at, rather than discovering the weakness three years and £2,200 later in a ruling. The reveal slide shows the wings at their most flattering. The decision is whether the mark still holds when it's standing next to the thing it's afraid of. One of those is a picture. The other is the brand.

Sources

• ●Carscoops — The Brand Aston Martin Is Suing Over Its Wings Badge Owns 17% Of Aston Martin (16 Apr 2026)
• ●The Drive — Aston Martin Is Dragging Part-Owner Geely Back to Court Over a Logo With Wings (17 Apr 2026)
• ●Creative Bloq — Aston Martin launches logo dispute… with its own shareholder (Apr 2026)
• ●BM Magazine — Aston Martin takes its 17pc shareholder Geely to court over 'copycat' wings logo (Apr 2026)
• ●CarBuzz — Aston Martin Sues One Of Its Own Shareholders Over Trademark Dispute (Apr 2026)
• ●Dezeen — Peter Saville unveils "subtle but necessary" update to Aston Martin logo (20 Jul 2022)
• ●Aston Martin — Aston Martin takes off into new era with brand repositioning and new iconic wings logo (19 Jul 2022)