Why Does Aston Martin Have Wings on Its Logo?

Aston Martin did not start with wings. The earliest archived badge, from 1921, is a small round emblem in which the letters A and M interlock in gold on a dark field. It sat on the radiator of the first cars built by Lionel Martin's company. The name itself came from Martin's surname plus Aston Hill, a hill climb near Aston Clinton where he raced.

The company was reorganized in the mid-1920s, and it was after that reshuffle that the wings arrived.

In 1927 the AM monogram gave way to a pair of swept-back metallic wings with ASTON MARTIN in large capitals across a V-shaped center. Aston Martin's own timeline for the logo says the wings reflected the 1920s fascination with aviation and "symbolised speed." The same page says the designer "remains a mystery to this day."

That is the whole documented story of 1927, and it is worth being plain about it. There is no surviving design brief that names an author, and a widely repeated claim that the wings copied the Bentley winged B is exactly that, a claim repeated in car-culture articles without a primary source. What can be said is that wings were a common idea on 1920s cars, and Aston Martin's own explanation is speed.

By 1932 the badge looked much closer to the one drivers know. The wings gained individual feathers, and the company name sat in a black rectangle at the center. The archive shows wide horizontal gold-toned wings and a black plate reading ASTON-MARTIN, with a hyphen that later disappeared.

Aston Martin's logo history credits this version to Sammy Davis, a racing driver and editor of The Autocar, and ties it to the 1930s fashion for Egyptology. It notes that the ancient Egyptians saw the scarab beetle as an extension of the sun god and a sign of new beginnings, and that the badge marked a fresh start after another rescue of the company. The scarab connection is the standard explanation for the spread wings of the 1932 design, but treat it as a documented interpretation of the shape, not a quoted sentence from Davis.

The layout has survived with changes of finish. Owner David Brown added his name above the plate from 1950 until he sold the company in 1972. A thin black line-art version with a green plate appeared in the early 2000s, and the current flat black-and-white badge, in use since 2021, thickens the outline into bold strokes with the name in dark serif capitals on a light plate.

The black plate, the feather fan and the swept outline are the parts that never left. Racing Green appears in the archive as the plate color of the 2003-era version, but the company's sources do not say the green is part of the wings' meaning.