In this paper a new vehicle logo recognition approach is presented using Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The system is specifically devised to work with images supplied by traffic cameras where the logos appear with low resolution. A sliding-window technique combined with a majority voting scheme are used to provide the estimated car manufacturer. The proposed approach is assessed on a set of 3.579 vehicle images, captured by two different traffic cameras that belong to 27 distinctive vehicle manufacturers. The reported results show an overall recognition rate of 92.59%, which supports the use of the system for real applications.