What's In A Name?

Naming an automobile is no easy task, as the number of cars with poorly thought out monikers has dotted the marketing landscape for over a century. My first awareness of what could be a laughably inappropriate choice was a car I owned, as did hundreds of thousands of others, a Chevrolet Nova. As it turned out, the Chevy was renamed when it went on sale in South America as the Spanish translation of Nova meant "no go". More recently, it has since come to the attention of Buick that their model, the LaCrosse, is popular teen slang for masturbation in French-Canadian dialect.

Sometimes, a name is a poor choice just because circumstances change. One of Studebaker's models in the 30s was the Dictator, probably not the best choosing with the advent of Germany's Hitler. Did Studebaker drive a Dictator to war? Or sometimes the name was a lousy selection in terms of what it couldn't accomplish. The Oldsmobile Achieva - sounds like a New Englander pronouncing "achiever" - was an embarrassingly slow seller that led to the demise of Oldsmobile. I guess you could call it an "underachieva". Some names are perfect descriptions while still perfectly horrible. The Daihatsu Charade was an absurd pretense of a car.

Of course, if a name didn't work for one manufacturer, who's to say it couldn't work for another. The American consumer, that's who! The Edsel model designation for two of their series was Pacer and Citation. That anyone would even consider reusing names from one of the best known automobile failures from Ford Motor Company must have been crazy, but Chevy tagged their first front-wheel drive model the Citation and American Motors dubbed their tub the Pacer. The Citation (originally to be named the "Condor") was so horribly assembled that they were falling apart on the dealership lots and died their natural death five years later. The AMC Pacer, also dead five years after introduction, is now the iconic symbol for 70s poor taste. Was the outcome of naming new cars after failed cars a foretelling? Paradoxically, the Edsel was introduced 0n September 4, 1957 and canceled for further production in January 1961.. five years.

Occasionally names just didn't seem to agree with the car they were to represent. How about the Lincoln Versailles? A cheap Ford tarted up to a "luxury" car was more than an insult to the French, it tarnished the reputation of Lincoln for decades. Ditto Cadillac, which took the lowly Chevy Cavalier and gussied it up as the Cimmaron. Great name for a breakfast pastry from Pillsbury but a complete disaster for Cadillac's standing as a premium luxury automobile, the Cimarron's failure was part of a series of events throughout the 80s and 90s that left the brand a shadow of its former self and from which it has only recently begun to emerge. Conversely, the Ford sub-compact Aspire was more appropriately tagged, in that you had ambitions toward achieving something like a real car with your next purchase. And nothing pretentious about the Chevrolet Celebrity. Why I can see Paris Hilton riding around in that piece of mediocrity right now, can't you?

I have laid off Asian car names because they always translate into weirdly feminine fractional sentences that bother me, such as "my pretty little pink pet" or "Blossom time for driving". Although Honda's "Big Dump" conjures masculine symbolism that... Let's stop there.

Lastly, auto manufacturers could avoid the turmoil and headaches of naming by not naming it at all. A Car Without A Name was an automobile built in 1909 by a company that identified itself in advertisements only as Department C, 19 North May Street, Chicago. The idea behind the name, or lack thereof, was that it would allow its buyers of the generic vehicle to name the vehicle as they wished, (or as ego permitted) without the expense or bother of setting up their own automobile concern. Such practices in the early days of the automobile market were not uncommon, however most companies that were involved with such endeavors at least had publicly known names. A Car Without A Name was equipped with a 30hp engine, three-speed transmission and came in three body styles, roadster, coupe and touring car, and continued in production through 1914 until its assets were liquidated at auction.

I wonder what name they put on the tombstone?