In recent years more and more businesses have rejected the traditional Roman letter, "L" and replaced it with what appears to me as the Greek Lambda (ʌ). It's also the Russian letter "L," since their alphabet is Greek-based. This leads to my typing this in a Slumsung computer monitor, and people driving Kil cars.

I can forgive those two examples, since they're both Korean companies and may simply not know any better. But when the US-based science program NOVA writes Novʌ they've gone awry. While "nova" and "novel" are related words, and the show often presents the novelties of science, I'm sure that's not their intent.

What's behind this lunacy? If it were just a trend, it would have died in the 1970s, after American Motors Corporation produced a fancy new logo using this construction. Are people just too darned lazy to do it correctly?

You're talking about how some companies use a capital A without the horizontal bar? That doesn't seem so weird to me.

The Russian and Greek letters look very different: Лл and Λλ