With so many new cars and new brands popping up almost every week, how do you give a car a name people can remember? Here’s our take on when car companies get it right, or wrong, or just confuse everyone.
Naming a car can be a marketing headache. Some car manufacturers don’t even bother, preferring to use numbers or some kind of alphanumeric combination. You might think that a simple number is a lot less evocative than a proper name, but try mentioning the number 911 near a Porsche enthusiast…
But most of the time, a proper name tends to be more memorable than a simple number or model code – even if it’s an unofficial name. For example, no-one ever refers to Volkswagen’s most famous car as the Type 1, which is its official title; to the whole world, it’s simply the Beetle (even though Volkswagen never used that name).
Old names for new cars
You can understand why car makers want to revive old names when they launch new cars, or simply cling onto them for decade after decade. After over a century of cars, coming up with a new name that nobody else owns is a huge task. For example, Elon Musk wanted to call his range of Teslas the Model S, Model E, Model X and Model Y (spelling out S.E.X.Y.). Unfortunately for Elon, Ford owned the rights to the Model E name and wasn’t interested in selling them. So we got the Tesla Model 3 instead.
For legacy car companies, bringing back a well-loved old name has often worked spectacularly well. In 2001 BMW brought us an all-new Mini which looked a little like the old one which had only just gone out of production. The Mini Cooper tag was already secured for the future and after Clubman and Countryman had their revivals it was time to invent the Paceman and the Aceman. Nice and neat.
Volkswagen had a good 21 years from the ‘New Beetle’ (despite technically never having had an ‘old’ Beetle…), the ‘new’ Fiat 500 of 2007 became a million-seller and spawned larger versions with the same face. The 2020 500 Electric picked up that style, which was stretched to add the 600e, although bringing back the 124 sports car didn’t last long.
It’s only just gone on sale in France, but it seems buyers are likely to go crazy for the new Renault 5, bringing back a name last seen in 1996 but with a real visual link to the original – then it’s reviving the even more legendary Renault 4 (last sold here 1992).
Ford is having good and bad days with old names. It worked with the Puma, the UK’s best-selling car last year and about to get an electric version. The nearest Puma ancestor was the well-liked little coupé of 1997-2002, and nobody seems to mind that today’s Puma is chalk and cheese in comparison.
However, Ford has faced criticism for its more recent attempts to revive other famous names from its history. Its first electric car was a large SUV and in a move that infuriated car enthusiasts – especially back home in America – it was called the Mustang Mach-E and given various Mustang design cues. Today, the Mustang Mach-E comfortably sits alongside the legendary petrol powered coupé in both North America and Europe, and there are plenty of Mustang fans who own the electric SUV as their daily car and a petrol version – either modern or classic – as their second car.
Having weathered that storm, Ford’s trying it again. This time it’s resurrecting a name last used in the 1980s on a sporty rear-wheel-drive coupé that’s still loved by many today – the Capri.
Like the electric Mustang, the new Ford Capri is a large five-door electric SUV. It’s based on the new Ford Explorer EV (wand both are based on a Volkswagen platform), which also revived another of Ford’s legendary American model names for European car buyers. To be fair, the Explorer was never a popular Ford model in Europe, but still is in the USA and Ford is trying to build on its ‘heritage’ names across its range.
Even before it’s in the showrooms, the new Capri seems to have mightily annoyed many people by looking nothing at all like its namesake. At least the Mustang Mach-E has plenty of clear visual references to the classic Ford sports car, which the Capri lacks. Is it a big mistake? Time will tell, but Ford has certainly scooped a lot of free publicity in the process. For a lot of younger people, ‘Capri’ may not have any real association with Ford anyway – or certainly not a specific association with what was largely a poor man’s Mustang.
Random names
Another approach used by car companies is to make up a new word – the Renault Twingo was made up of twist+swing+tango, or create a name which almost sounds like a real word but isn’t. Other made-up names include the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia Stonic, Vauxhall Mokka and Grandland. Toyota even did the same for a whole car company when launching its premium brand Lexus in the 19080s.
Alternatively, you could introduce real words that have nothing to do with cars but stick in your mind, hopefully in a good way. This is the option preferred by Chinese manufacturers which are big names at home but unknown in Europe.
GWM Ora was formed in 2018 as a subsidiary of Great Wall Motors, which is the eighth-largest automobile manufacturer in China. Ora stands for ‘Open, Reliable and Alternative’’ and is aimed at younger people. Its first EV in 2022 was called the GWM Funky Cat. In Europe it also sold the hybrid sub-brand Wey, the Wey Coffee 01 and Coffee 02 SUVs. It seems that this was too much coffee and one too many cats. The Funky Cat is now the GWM Ora 03, the Wey Coffees now the GWM Wey 05 and GWM Wey 03.
On the other hand, BYD (Build Your Dreams) offers the Seal and Dolphin models. The cars have nothing to do with aquatic creatures apart from being a smooth shape, but hey, what’s not to like about seals and dolphins? In China, it also has a model called the Seagull, but that’s not currently available in the UK.
Still, could be worse. Mitsubishi launched a sporty coupé model back in the 1980s called the Starion. Except that it was supposed to be called the ‘Stallion’ (since it was inspired by the Ford Mustang, and Mitsubishi also had a model called the Colt), but got caught up in an embarrassing example of Japanese mispronunciation of English words. The company hurriedly came up with a story that suggested that the name was a portmanteau of ‘Star of Orion’, but no-one fell for it.
Mitsubishi did have some form with poor naming choices. For decades, Mitsubishi’s large SUV was called the Pajero in most of the world but it was changed to Shogun or Montero in certain markets. It turns out that the original name was quite insulting in Spanish…
Alphabet soup
Many car manufacturers have used various alphanumeric combinations as model names to position their models, although the names usually had a logical structure. Today, you’d be forgiven that some car manufacturers have completely lost the plot.
Then there is the tactic of a seemingly random mix of lower and upper case letters with numbers. Some even throw in a punctuation mark of some description.
Nobody’s been able to make any sense of the Honda e:Ny1. This bizarre combination of lower-case letter, colon, upper-case letter, another lower-case letter and number was quickly interpreted by motoring journos everywhere (and even some Honda people) as being a play on the word “anyone”, until being severely told off by higher-up Honda spokespeople. You must pronounce it as “E-N-Y-1”, although apparently the colon is silent…
Then there’s the Toyota bZ4X, a mid-size electric SUV. Like the Honda, the clunky combination of lower case and upper case lettering is infuriating to both grammar pedants and auto-correct software. Toyota explains it’s the first model to be launched in its bZ ‘beyond zero’ family of zero-emission vehicles, and that the name references the size of the car (4 means mid-size, apparently) and vehicle type (X means crossover or SUV). There will be more bZ models with equally catchy names coming soon, we are told.
Mercedes gives its electric models an ‘EQ’ designation (EQA, EQB, EQC, EQE, EQS and EQV so far). But that doesn’t tell you what sort of car each of those are – and the EQE and EQS are sold as both saloons and SUVs, just to make it more complicated. Except the new electric version of the G-Class isn’t called the EQG, as it was changed at the last minute to become the “Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology”.
When numerical logic goes wrong
There’s always been a logic to numbers going up as cars go up in size. BMW, for example, built its reputation on the 3 Series, 5 Series and 7 Series for its small, medium and large saloons. Audi adopted its ‘A’ naming strategy in the 1990s, ranging from A2 to A8 as the cars went from smallest to largest.
But this became more complicated as brands started offering a greater variety of body styles. Traditional saloons, hatchbacks and estates were joined by MPVs and SUVs, there was a run on coupés and cabriolets, then we got swoopier saloons and estates that the Germans like to (incorrectly) call ‘four-door coupés’ and ‘shooting brakes’, and then something called a ‘coupé SUV’. So we needed more letters and numbers to cover all eventualities, and then we needed to find some way to differentiate electric cars from petrol models.
This has resulted in something of a confusing mess. We could give you pages of confusing nomenclature, but we can see your eyes glazing over so we’ll just highlight a few examples.
Audi is in the process of rearranging its numbering so that even numbers are for electric models (like the new A6 and Q6 models, for example), while odd numbers denote fossil-fuel models. So the new A5 saloon replaces the old A4 saloon, while the A6 and A8 replacements will apparently be named the A7 and A9. The old A5 coupé and cabriolet models have disappeared, while the current A7 will also vanish soon.
This has led to plenty of confusion as this is gradually rolled out, with Audi currently offering both the Q8 (which is a petrol- or diesel-powered SUV) and the Q8 e-tron (which is a completely unrelated electric SUV)
Volkswagen has the names ID.3, ID.4, ID.5 and ID.7 for its electric models, which seems sensible until you add in the ID. Buzz, which sits between the ID.5 and ID.7 in terms of size but isn’t called the ID.6…
Aston Martin has a long tradition of DB cars, starting with the DB2 (at which point the old car was hastily renamed the DB1). But after the DB7, Aston Martin decided to jump a number and go straight to the DB9. It then skipped DB10 as well because that was a James Bond movie special, so went straight on to DB11 and now DB12. We bet there won’t be an ‘unlucky’ 13 either, so we expect the DB12’s replacement to be the DB14.
Peugeot has followed a logical three-digit naming tradition since the 1950s and its current range includes the 208, 308, 408 and 508. For its SUV models, it adds another zero – so you get 2008, 3008 and 5008. Of course, car companies can’t help making a mess of things and Peugeot’s certainly done that.
The 208, for example, is pronounced as “Two-Oh-Eight” in the same fashion that Peugeot has used for as long as its three-digit system has existed. But the SUV version of that car, the 2008, is most definitely not the “Two-Double-Oh-Eight” as literally everyone who’s not a Peugeot employee calls it. According to Peugeot people, it absolutely must be pronounced as “Two Thousand and Eight”. Which would be fine if the hatch was called the “Two Hundred and Eight”, but is otherwise contradictory nonsense.
Then there’s Smart. For its new electric SUV that relaunched the brand after a long run of tiny city cars, it went with the name #1. Seems logical for the first model of a new generation, right? That’s because you almost certainly pronounced it in your head as “Number One”. But it’s actually supposed to be “Hashtag One”. To confuse things further, the second model was the #3 and the third model will be called the #5. Maybe Smart just doesn’t like even numbers?
In a ray of hope for common-sense car naming, Kia is keeping things simple with its new range of electric cars: EV3, EV6 and EV9, with an EV4 and EV5 on the way.
Likewise, Swedish EV brand Polestar has the 2, 3 and 4 models, with the next two cars set to be called (unsurprisingly) the 5 and 6. Clear and logical, if not particularly exciting. Although there’s inevitably one wrinkle there – if you’re wondering what happened to the Polestar 1, it did actually exist. It was a very expensive, strictly limited-production performance flagship model that didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the brand. It wasn’t even an EV, which is a slightly odd choice for an EV-only car company. Because it is obviously asking too much for things to be simple…
Additional reporting by Stuart Masson.
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