Car companies (at least European ones) tend to be pretty transparent about this: - Audi (example): letter (car/SUV/race car)+ number (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury) - BMW: first number is a quality class, two numbers is the Engine size. - Mercedes: first letter is a quality class, number is the engine.

Other luxury consumer goods use pretty similar schemes, e.g. Audio gear (e.g. bang + olufsen: the higher the number the better, with some number of meaningless zeroes added depending on fashion).

One observation might be that these companies all have halo products that are used to anchor/promote the volume offerings that drive revenue (e.g. The Audi r8 and the a3, the 90k speakers and the 1k set)