- All right, guys.
Thanks for coming to the meeting today.
We're going to be naming our brand new,
ah, hybrid mid-size crossover.
- Question, is it fast? Is it powerful?
- Ah, absolutely not.
- Perfect. I have a name for it.
- Great.
- Approacha.
Sounds Italian, sounds exotic.
- Did you just take the word approach
and add an 'a' onto the end of it?
- No.
- Anybody else?
- I've got an idea.
- Are you eating soup in a meeting?
- What is it a crime to drink soup in a meeting?
- No.
- How about we call it the X Five S T I
M 440 I X drive P Zev.
- That's great. How'd you come up with that?
- I dunno.
- Well, that's awesome. Really love the synergy guys.
Does anyone else have any other pitches?
- Ebussy.
- Hey Rich, did you, by any chance, Google that?
Car names are dumb. Today on Wheelhouse,
Where do car names come from?
Why do some areas of the world do it
differently than others?
Why are they dumb so often?
And at the end, I'll choose the
definitive five worst car names of all time.
- Big thanks to Omaze for sponsoring today's video.
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- Because of recent cars like the Nissan Kicks
and Hyundai Iioniq,
it might seem like auto manufacturers don't
put a lot of thought into their car names,
but it's actually quite the opposite.
It's always been this way.
It even took a while to land on the word
automobile over competing names like;
autobaine, buggyaut, oleo locomotive.
I think we chose the right one though.
It was actually only when the New York Times
mentioned the name automobile,
that it started gaining popularity.
Even though the newspaper hated it.
On January 3rd of 1899, they wrote
that the new-fangled motor carriages quote
"are all unutterably ugly
and never a one of them has been provided
with a good or even an endurable name.
The French have evolved automobile,
which being half Greek and half Latin
is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation."
I do say Greek and Latin, how scandalous.
(spitting)
Since then automobile companies have been
in an endless contest to find the
perfect most sellable names for their cars.
Sometimes they come up with a classic,
like Ford Mustang.
Sometimes they come up with an incomprehensible
collection of letters and numbers
like the Mercedes GLS 350D 4Matic.
And sometimes they come up with
the Mazda Titan Dump.
(booing)
Naming a car is a massive process.
Think about it,
these are huge companies
and not only are they spending millions
to produce these vehicles,
but they'll be spending millions on top of that
to market the hell out of them.
This name will be on billboards.
Matthew McConaughey might mumble it in a commercial.
So there are some requirements.
Most obviously the name has to appeal to the
demographic it's being marketed to.
And has to be original enough to
stand out.
For example, in the early 2000,
there was a boom in crossover SUV's that ushered in names
like Ford Escape and Nissan Rogue
to attract a rebellious clientele.
That's definitely not following the herd,
but it's not always that simple.
There are a couple of huge obstacles
that might derail an otherwise
awesome car name.
One, is that someone maybe already trademarked it.
There's not much use in trying to market a Chevy Xbox
because that territory is pretty well claimed.
Ford actually ran into this problem
when they tried to sell the Mustang in Germany.
Another company already owned the copyright.
So, Ford had to sell the pony car
as the T5 over there.
It doesn't really have the same ring to it.
It's not even a horse.
Can't ride a T five.
How am I supposed to ride a T five?
Another hurdle is that
because car sales is a global business,
most names have to work in any language
or at least not be offensive in any language.
The most famous example of cars that broke these rules
are probably the Chevy Nova and the Mazda Laputa.
Seems like neither company
had a Spanish English dictionary on hand
during the brainstorm.
And let's not even dissect the thought
process behind the eBussy.
Once the possible name is cleared
the marketing department, the legal department,
and the let's make sure this isn't
the Swedish word for colonic department.
It finally goes to the CEO for ultimate approval.
This is true of pretty much any company these days,
but there are some subtle ways that American, European
and Asian car companies all do it differently.
The naming journey for American cars
began about as simply as it could have.
When Ford motors introduced the original model A
in 1903, as Henry Ford continued to
develop and experiment with new models.
He named them the model B model C, etc.
all the way to the historically popular model T.
Though not every new model was put on sale.
Now model T is still one of the top 10
bestselling cars ever.
So clearly, no one was complaining about the name
and Ford liked the system so much
that he even started at over in 1928,
by re-introducing the new model A.
His rivals and former partners over at Cadillac
used the same exact naming scheme as Ford,
but they did perhaps make the first American car
with an actual name in 1905.
The Osceola Coupe was named after a
Seminole chief and was an early prototype
for closed body vehicles.
In the 1930s and 40s some American companies
began more commonly using word names
rather than simple model names to try
and chip away at Ford and Chevy's market dominance.
Most notably Studebaker used the two world wars
as a backdrop to market models like the Commander,
the President, and unfortunately the Dictator.
This is a contender for the earliest,
extremely stupid car name.
Yo Mussolini and Hitler and Franco like
let's name cars after those guys, really cool.
By the sixties and seventies marketing departments
had finally wrestled control of naming
away from the engineers
and they thought it was important that
American cars give the impression of power and speed,
which led to cars like the Challenger,
Charger and Corvette.
Another naming convention that quickly became
popular among American manufacturers,
was to name cars after impressive animals.
You had your Cougars, Stingrays, and Roadrunners.
This makes sense.
The right animal association instantly
tells you something about the car
and Rams can't sue for trademark infringement.
One notable downside to this naming scheme
is that there's only so many cool animals to go around,
which is how you end up with odd names
like the Chevrolet Bison or Dodge Super Bee,
and more generally American companies
definitely tend to get carried away
with their endless search for bold image based
names like the Pontiac Aztec, Ford Probe,
and Dodge Dart Swinger.
You get the idea, but really how did Swinger get approved?
I'm surprised it didn't come with like
a pineapple decal on the side.
Was it built for the bar who's constantly
swapping cars with their friends.
How do you leave the party when your keys
are in the fishbowl?
I could go on.
Like early American automakers,
their European counterparts also saw a lot of sense in
keeping track of their models with simple letters
and numbers as labels.
The difference is, is that they never really stopped.
Particularly the German luxury brands.
On one hand, it's a good system
because you don't have to worry about the
BMW 330 CI, getting confused for
anything except a barcode.
And it can actually be helpful when consumers are
considering their cars.
I mean, for example, BMW has possibly the easiest
of the alpha numeric names to decode.
In the 330 CI, the first 3 means 3 series.
The 30 means a three liter engine.
C means coupe, and I means fuel injected.
Somewhat, Similarly, Audi uses A, Q, and R
followed by 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
A means sedan, Q means SUV
and R means sports car and the numbers ascend in size.
If I want the roomiest Audi sedan,
I'm looking for an A8, easy.
But the system has limits,
for one thing even if a name is a mix of numbers
and letters, car companies still want it
to be easy to pronounce.
So it can't just be any numbers and letters.
Nobody is ever going to buy a BMW WW 2.
For another, the more cars you make,
the more confusing the naming system gets,
which is problematic,
if you want your car company to last long time.
Mercedes's naming system used to make
a lot of sense with the letters
and numbers for each model correlating with the
engine size and vehicle class.
But they also didn't use to make
nearly as many cars or trims as they do now.
These days they have confusing competing names
like the SL, SLK, SLS and CLS.
BMW features the ultimate example of confusing
and unnecessary lettering because in the 70s,
they started adding the little lowercase I to models
with a fuel injected engine.
This probably seemed like a cool
and stylish way to advertise that these
cars featured better technology.
Except now nearly every car these
days uses fuel injection,
and there's not really any point in bragging about it,
but they're still sticking that little i on there
on pretty much any car that's not diesel.
The absolute worst name and BMW's lineup though has to be
the M635CSi, which sounds like either
a default internet password
or a new crime show starring David Caruso.
Of course, it's not just European companies
that still use letters
or numbers to differentiate their models.
Some of Tesla's first cars where the model S
and the model X
and Elon Musk wanted to name their next car, the model E
because he thought it was funny that the letters
S E X spell sex,
but Ford already owned the model E trademark
from back in Henry Ford's day.
So Elon settled on the model three
because S 3 X almost spells sex.
And of course, in 2019 Tesla unveiled
the model Y an SUV That's extremely S E X E,
and corny, A F.
Got him (beep).
Got you, Elon.
You think your naming conventions are funny, bro?
You think it's funny to spell S E X,
are you S I X bro? Nerd.
So American companies prefer big, bold image based names.
European companies often stick with
the alpha numeric combos of yore.
And then there's Japan, which does a mix of both.
But why?
Well, for one thing, the major Asian car companies
were generally founded more recently
than the big auto makers in the US and Europe.
So by the time their cars became globally popular,
it was already a well-established
tradition that each one needed a good name
to stand out.
In fact, they were largely
welcoming of American style model names.
To the point that nearly all Japanese
cars are branded with English lettering,
including those that stay in Japan.
Former Nissan design chief Shiro Nakamura
even told Jalopnik that he thinks Japanese cars
will never have badges in Japanese
because Japan is very culturally welcoming
to words borrowed from other cultures.
But that's not to say there's no Japanese influence
on the naming process.
Toyota's vehicle names often come from
references to crowns, architecture,
royalty, mythology, and natural patterns.
The name Camry is a phonetic spelling
of the Japanese word Kan-Murri,
which means crown.
And also references to the crown sedan,
which Toyota has been making domestically
in Japan since 1955.
Similarly, the Corolla is named after
the outer crown of a flower.
However, there's also a lot of European influence,
particularly in the Japanese luxury brands.
The most prominent of these brands, Lexus,
has a made up name, which Toyota says, quote,
"combines, word roots, evoking images
of luxury and technology."
To enhance that image,
they borrowed the naming conventions
from their German competitors
and called their flagship car the LS
or Luxury Sedan.
Honda and Nissan also went with European styling,
alpha numeric names when they introduced Acura
and Infiniti respectively.
But when Japanese and Korean companies lack
tradition to fall back on,
they often seem focused on finding names
that are cool and hip for the kids.
AKA your kicks in your Kia Stingers.
This points to another thing that has
always been true about naming cars,
both in Asia and around the globe.
Sometimes it's just nonsense.
Hyundai and Kia both love making up words
like the Veloster or the Sportage.
One legendary story is that Mitsubishi
wanted to take a page from the Americans book
and named their new sports coupe The Stallion,
except that the name was misinterpreted
on a garbled phone call with US representatives
as the Mitsubishi Starion.
And then they just kind of went with it,
it's a cool name, heck Nissan, literally named a car
The Fair Lady, because the head of the company
liked the Broadway musical My Fair Lady so much.
So we've learned how car makers name their cars.
It's pretty straightforward.
Choose a word that evokes the feeling you want associated
with the design
and make sure it's not the Vietnamese word for prostate.
But somehow companies still mess it up.
Without further ado, here are the
unequivocal worst names in car history.
- [Automated Voice] Number five.
the Great Wall Wingle 5.
A pickup truck manufactured by the
Chinese company Great Wall Motors.
Wingle either means horse in Chinese
or is a combo of wind and eagle in English,
depending on what story you believe.
- [Automated Voice] Number four
- The Gaylord Gladiator.
Jim and Ed Gaylord were the heirs to a huge
bobby pin fortune
and wanted to make a car nicer than a Rolls Royce.
Unfortunately, though, the Gladiator proved too
expensive to produce
and only four were made.
And with a name like that,
maybe that's a good thing.
- [Automated Voice] Number three.
- The Dodge Challenger Scat Pack.
Dodge invented the term scat pack in the 1960s.
By combining the word scat, as in get lost,
with Frank Sinatra's popular Rat Pack.
And for some reason they've kept it around,
even though Sinatra has been dead for 25 years.
And as much as I love Dodge, scat stinks.
- [Automated Voice] Number two.
- The Subaru Touring Bruce,
the lesson of these last two is don't
name your cars after celebrities.
The Bruce was a re badged 1993 Subaru Legacy
sold only in Japan because Bruce Willis
was in a Subaru TV commercial there.
That's the whole story.
- [Automated Voice] Number one.
Is a tie, the Renault Le Car
and the Ferrari LaFerrari.
The Renault Le Car and the Ferrari LaFerrari
share the embarrassment as two names that are
somehow extremely dumb
and extremely uncreative at the same time.
The Renault 5 was rebranded for the American market
as Le Car, in order to help market it
as the most popular car in Europe.
40 years later, after the Renault,
Ferrari explained that in context,
the LaFerrari name is supposed to mean that it's the
definitive Ferrari.
But neither is really working for LeNolan.
Of course, car names are stupid.
Look at all the stuff they're trying to do at once.
They have to stand out, they have to be trademarked.
They can't accidentally mean a bad word.
What you sometimes end up with is corporate mediocrity.
In light of the many obstacles that stand between
any car and a good solid name,
it's actually a miracle we have any cool ones at all.
So don't focus on the fact that
most car names are kind of corny.
So just hold close your Lamborghini Huracan's,
and your Ford Lightenings.
Even if you drive a Titan Dump.
Thank you very much for watching Wheelhouse.
It's a fun one, goofy one.
Let me know your favorite car names down in the comments.
Make sure to show your work, tell me why,
you know, or don't it's fine.
I mean, even off the top of my head,
I can't even think of like a cool car name.
It's a really hard job.
Like the first for some reason,
the first word that came to mind was the vision,
which is kind of cool actually,
but Disney probably owns that trademark
or something, but it's hard.
Looking around the room for the,
the Ford Succulent.
Boom done.
Hire me.
If you, excuse me, I have to go park
a Scat Pack on my own.
Be kind I'll see you next time!