Looks like the German marketing battle royal is getting an unexpected new opponent from the Land of the Rising Sun and one of the aforementioned German automakers didn’t take the campaign particularly well.

You know how Porsche->ke1, Audi->ke14, and BMW->ke178 have, at one point or another, taken stabs at each other through a number of marketing campaigns? Well, Nissan->ke62 did all of them better by blasting all three German brands in one guerilla campaign that, believe it or not, drew the ire of the boys from Stuttgart.

During the Goodwood Festival of Speed a few weeks ago, Nissan came out with a pretty unique guerilla-marketing ploy by emblazoning the sides of a number of its vehicles with the logos of Audi, BMW, and Porsche with matching tally marks across each logo, which presumably meant the number of times a Nissan car beat these brands at the Nurburgring->ke999.

Not one to take the taunting lightly, Porsche immediately demanded Nissan to remove their company’s logo from the ad or face the wrath of a copyright infringement lawsuit. On the flip side, Nissan was not one to be deterred. While they did remove Porsche’s logo from the ad, they did replace it with a simple word that you wouldn’t mistake for anything else other than a direct reference to the Stuttgart-based automaker: ‘Porsche’.

We gotta say, Nissan outfoxed Porsche on this one so they might as well emblazon another tally across Porsche’s name there.

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