Is Car Debadging Illegal In The US? Here's What You Should Know

A very inexpensive and highly effective small modification you can make to your car, at least from a visual standpoint, is to debadge it. As the name implies, this involves removing the factory badging, typically on the rear hatch or trunk lid. You can either remove all the badging or just the trim level and model designations. As well as cleaning up the rear end and making it look nicer, you can also potentially mask up if you have one of the lower-end powertrains or trim levels for your particular car model, although you shouldn't be embarrassed about that.

On occasion, some car owners also completely remove the front badging. Whether that means simply removing the badge or installing an aftermarket grille insert without it, a completely badgeless car is not uncommon. For the most part, debadging your car is 100% legal — you won't face any repercussions for removing the SEL badge from your stock Jetta with GLI bumpers.

Because the badging on a car's exterior is purely for marketing and identification, it is completely legal to remove it. Only intentionally removing — or in some cases, adding — badging to make your car look like a different car because of various shady reasons can get you in trouble, but if you're doing it for cosmetic purposes, you're totally fine. 

Depending on what you drive, it might be a more or less involved process to remove the badges. Most older cars had screwed-in badges, which would require you to unscrew them, but then you'd be left with a cutout for a badge and two screw holes in the bodywork, which would have to be patched up. 

Mercifully, most modern cars have glued-on badging; a little bit of heat and a very careful use of a plastic wedge or a string, then another wipe-down should give you that clean, debadged look. Just be careful when removing it, as it's easy to damage the paint. Some people wax the area after the badging is removed, and you should err on the side of caution with that as well, since it might eat into the clearcoat. If you do decide on the car wax, make sure you get the right one.

Also, don't get them confused — shaving the bodywork is different from debadging. While debadging simply involves removing all the exterior markings, shaving is often a much more involved process that requires smoothing out areas of the bodywork — often door handles and molding strips — to make them look as if they were never there. In any case, if you do decide to hide the fact that your Civic Si is an Si, you definitely won't get in trouble with the law.