Sunbeam Logo: Meaning and Every Version Since 1914

The Sunbeam logo is a round enamel badge with a deep blue field and a thin yellow ring, showing a silver lion with a crown above it. Sunbeam was a British car brand from Wolverhampton that began making cars in 1901 and stayed on cars until the Talbot Sunbeam ended in 1981.

Sunbeam Logo

The Sunbeam emblem is a circular badge. A silver lion stands on all fours against the blue enamel with its head turned back over its shoulder, and a small crown sits above it. The yellow ring around the edge frames the blue field, so this Sunbeam badge reads as a metal and enamel plaque on the front of a car. The lion and crown is the Sunbeam symbol and Sunbeam car logo shown on this page, and the page offers the Sunbeam logo PNG with a transparent background.

Sunbeam Logo History

The Sunbeam logo evolution starts with lettering. The old Sunbeam logo was an oval metal badge with the name SUNBEAM written in an italic script across the middle. Badges of this kind are photographed on cars from 1914 and again on a 1926 tourer, so the script oval was used around those years.

The Rootes brothers bought Sunbeam in 1934. The blue badge with the silver lion is photographed on a 1966 Sunbeam Tiger, and it is the version shown at the top of this page.

By 1938 the Rootes brothers added the Sunbeam name to their Talbot range and called the cars Sunbeam-Talbots. Their logo set the lion badge in the middle of a pair of wings, with SUNBEAM on the left wing, TALBOT on the right and SUPREME above. They dropped Talbot from the name in 1954, which ended this winged Sunbeam-Talbot badge.

Sunbeam History

John Marston first registered the Sunbeam name in 1888 for his pedal-cycle business in Wolverhampton. Sunbeam motor car manufacture began in 1901. In 1905 the motor business was sold to a newly incorporated Sunbeam Motor Car Company Limited, with works at Moorfields in Blakenhall, to separate it from the cycle business. Sunbeam motorcycles were not made until 1912.

The designer Louis Coatalen drew the company into motor racing, Grand Prix events and world land speed records, and Sunbeam also built its own aero engines during the First World War. Slow sales led to losses, and a receiver was appointed in 1924. Sunbeam was sold to the Rootes brothers in 1934, who chose not to resume its old-fashioned cars.

The Sunbeam marque appeared on new cars until 1976. The name then lived on as a model, first the Chrysler Sunbeam from 1977 to 1979 and then the Talbot Sunbeam, which ended in 1981 after PSA Group took over Chrysler Europe.