What's In A Car Name? Maybe A Lot More Than The Manufacturers Think

So what's in a car name? Hours, or even months, of research & head scratching, that's what. Yet ironically, the giant automobile manufacturers still can get it spectacularly wrong. I mean, imagine sitting round a large, sanitised table under strip lighting, as you watch the marketing suits from Ford present their new weapon to prise young business folk away from buying Audi, Mazda and BMW: “..ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present to you today – The Ford Probe..” The what? Did he just say, Probe? It must have made some of the middle aged men sit rather lightly on their chairs.

But the point here is that it got agreed. I know some of the processes behind the branding of a vehicle from my days at Nissan – it's not a throwaway, haphazard decision. Yet it somehow passed all Ford's vetting procedures. When Nissan's concept vehicle the Dune (or Dunehawk or Qazana) matured into the Juke, we all wondered if marketing had considered the problems that might arise with such a name – one big recall and it's rechristened The Joke. As it turns out, some of the initial press with their ever eloquently classy puns, re-branded this Beach Buggy offspring as either the Juke of Hazard or with some misaligned reference to John Wayne. None of them great selling points in an over saturated and competitive car market. Still, it's slightly less embarrassing than trying to get classic car insurance quotes on a car called a Cedric.

The Nissan QASHQAI was named after a nomadic tribe from Iran, famous for their fine weaving – weaving being another comparison you would not necessarily want associated with a car. It also proved to be a stumbling block in the pronunciation department for anyone over 50. The “Squashy” being the funniest mispronunciation I heard. But if you want an almost impossible car name to pronounce with any assuredness, look no further than Volkswagen's Touareg. I recognise it on paper, but given a chance to say it out loud in public, well I don't think i'd risk it. Toe rag maybe..

But it gets worse, this is only the tip of the iceberg (which is incidentally, a badly named vegetable) as you are now no doubt beginning to wonder just how - like weathermen - the people that come up with car names ever manage to keep their jobs.

Mazda Laputa - it may indeed have derived from Gulliver's Travels, but in Spanish this is a word associated with a “lady of the night” shall we politely say. While the Chevrolet Nova is the stuff of urban legend – No Va (as two words) roughly translated, means “doesn't go” in Spanish.

Some of the names that car manufacturers have given their cars can verge on being obscene depending where you are in the world. I'm not sure how well Honda's Fitta would sell in some parts of Scandinavia for example. Meanwhile, in keeping with Ford's Probe tradition, Dodge merrily named one of their automobiles the Swinger - no doubt followed down the motorway by a Ford Escort and an MG Midget with the theme from Benny Hill playing on the stereo.

Subaru got clever though – a fad that has really taken off in recent years with the explosion in automobile technology and safety – using an abbreviation of their Bi-drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter, they managed to bypass all logic and call this particular motor a Brat.

I think that there's only one safe bet here, go the BMW route and name the majority of your vehicles letters or numbers.