How car models got their names
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Finding a name for a car is much less difficult and expensive than designing and building it, but in a way it’s no less important. Although, as Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, that sort of thinking isn’t going to impress the marketing department.
Different companies have very different policies. In the 1960s, a Brazilian manufacturer hit the jackpot when it decided to name its new sports car after a nearby municipality and came up with the thunderously wonderful Brasinca Uirapuru.
At the other end of the scale, BMW and Volvo play it safe and go for names like X5 and V40. Who’s to say they’re wrong?
You also have to be careful that the name doesn’t mean something rude in the language of a country where the car will be sold. Using a name that someone else has used before is another no-no, as it could easily lead to legal action.
It’s a minefield, but one that manufacturers successfully negotiate year after year. Here are 49 of the thousands of car model names which have made it to the showroom, and how they got there.
Abarth 695 biposto
The 695 biposto is the most extreme example of Abarth’s Fiat 500-based hot hatch. The number simply indicates that it’s more powerful than either the 500 or the mid-range 595.
The colourful word biposto, usually written without a capital letter, is the Italian for two-seater. It refers to the fact that this track-oriented has no rear seat, leaving just one each for the driver and front passenger.
Alfa Romeo MiTo
The unusual name of Alfa Romeo’s supermini uses the first two letters of Milan, where it was designed, and Turin, where it’s built.
Yes, that makes it look like it should really be called the MiTu. It’s actually MiTo because the Italian word for Turin is Torino.
Alfa Romeo Stelvio
Alfa Romeo’s first SUV is named after the Stelvio mountain pass in northern Italy, one of the highest paved roads in the Alps.
The Stelvio has been used for rallying, and has been a stage of the Giro d’Italia cycle race on and off since 1953, most recently in May 2017.
Aston Martin DB11
The DB11 is the latest in a long series of DB Astons which began in 1950 with the DB2.
They are named after David Brown, who saved Aston Martin from one of it many financial crises shortly after World War II. Brown sold the company in 1972, but his name continues to be honoured in two-letter form.
Audi Quattro
Quattro is the Italian word for ‘four’. Audi first used it in 1980 to emphasise that its latest model had four-wheel drive, an unusual feature at the time.
As well as being an exciting road car, the Quattro utterly transformed the sport of rallying. Audi added the word quattro to the title of later 4×4 models to associate them with the dominant rally cars.
This effect has largely worn off by now, but four-wheel drive Audis still use the quattro name.
Audi TT
Like other German manufacturers, Audi doesn’t go in for imaginative model names, preferring instead to call its cars things like A3, Q2, S8 and so on.
The TT is an exception. The letters stand for Tourist Trophy, the motorcycle race meeting which has been held on the Isle of Man since 1907.
German bike manufacturer NSU (which also built cars) competed successfully in TT events in the early days. It was later merged with Auto Union, itself a merger of four other brands, to become what we know today as Audi.
Austin Allegro
One of the best-selling British cars of the 1960s and 70s was the 1100/1300 series, marketed under the Austin, MG, Morris, Riley, Vanden Plas and Wolseley brands.
The model which followed it wasn’t as successful, but at least it had a less hysterical naming strategy. It was mostly sold as an Austin (though there were Vanden Plas versions) and it had a proper name rather than a choice of two numbers.
That name was Allegro, the Italian word for ‘quickly’ and one of the first terms that music students have to learn. It sounds cheery, but it’s not very appropriate for the car, which was never intended to be a high performer.
Bentley Mulsanne
The most expensive and luxurious of all current Bentleys is the Mulsanne. It’s named after the Mulsanne straight and following corner on the Le Mans race circuit, where Bentley won the 24 Hour race five times between 1924 and 1930, and again in 2003.
This is the second Bentley to be called Mulsanne. The first, a turbocharged version of a rebadged Rolls-Royce, was manufactured from 1980 to 1992.
BMW Isetta
The Isetta was a rare exception to BMW’s normal practice of using numbers and sometimes letters for its model names.
It wasn’t BMW’s own work. The Isetta was a thoroughly re-engineered version of a bubble car created by Italian manufacturer Iso. BMW kept the name, which means ‘little Iso’.
Cadillac Escalade
Cadillac has been making full-sized SUVs called Escalade across four generations for nearly two decades.
In other contexts, an escalade is a method of attacking a fort by placing ladders on the outer walls and climbing up them. It could be very successful but it was also very dangerous, as the enemy might pour boiling water over you during your ascent, or simply kick the ladders away.
Caterham Seven
Caterham Cars was established in the early 1970s to continue production of the Lotus Seven after Lotus had decided to move on to other things.
It’s often assumed that the original car was the seventh designed by Lotus founder Colin Chapman, but this is not true.
Chapman’s seventh car was actually an incomplete single-seat racer which was finished by other people and named the Clairmonte Special. The Seven name was first used for a production car after Lotus had started selling the Eleven.
Chevrolet Corvette
Chevrolet has been building Corvette sports cars of one kind or another since 1953. The name refers to a type of small, manoeuvrable warship, and has been used from the 17th century to the present day.
Corvette is a French word, but it may have been derived from the Dutch korf and Latin corbis, both meaning ‘basket’.
Citroen DS
Citroen’s incredibly innovative new saloon car of 1955 was called the DS. It was a clever name, because if pronounced in French it sounds like déesse, the French word for goddess.
Citroen was quite keen on this sort of word play at the time. A simpler version of the DS was called the ID, which sounds like idée, or idea.
The DS was replaced by the CX in the 1970s, but the name came back in 2010, when Citroen started to create new DS models based on existing cars. The DS brand has since become a separate entity within Groupe PSA, though the cars are still essentially Citroens.
Ferrari Testarossa
Ferrari only occasionally uses interesting names, no doubt because it would rather let the cars do the talking. One exception was the Testarossa.
Testarossa means ‘redhead’, but it has nothing to do with hair. It refers to the red paintwork on the cylinder heads of the 1950s 250 Testa Rossa sports racing car.
Ferrari gave the engine of the 1980s road car the same treatment and brought back the name, contracting it from two words to one.
Fiat 124 Spider
Spider is a term commonly used for open sports cars. The 124 part of the name of Fiat’s current model, a close relative of the Mazda MX-5, harks back to the 1960s.
At the time, Fiat used low three-figure numbers for its car names. They ranged from 124 to 133 and had nothing to do with size. For example, the 124 was larger than the 126 but smaller than the 130.
The 124 was a conventional-looking three-box saloon which became the Russian Lada. The original 124 Spider, commemorated in the name of the new model, used the same mechanicals but was very much better looking.
Fiat X1/9
This very pretty sports car of the 1970s had a name quite unlike that of any other production Fiat. In fact it was never really given a name at all.
In Fiat’s prototype code system, X1 referred to any experimental passenger vehicle. Their fates varied. The X1/20 became the Lancia Beta Montecarlo, while the X1/23 disappeared after being shown as a compact electric concept car in 1976.
The X1/9 was simply the ninth in the series, and when Fiat decided to put into production it was sold with the prototype code rather than a new name.
Ford Fiesta
During its development in the early to mid 1970s, the Fiesta was known as the Bobcat, but Ford never intended to sell it under that name. Many others were considered, including Bravo, Pony and Sierra, which were later used by, respectively, Fiat, Hyundai and Ford itself.
Fiesta was also on the shortlist, but there was a problem. General Motors already owned the rights to the name, and had used it for an estate version of the Oldsmobile 88 in the 1950s.
However, company CEO Henry Ford II liked Fiesta better than all the other candidates, so he personally called GM to ask for permission to use it. GM, recognising that its old estate and Ford’s modern supermini were hardly going to be competitors, gave it freely.
Ford Granada
Ford occasionally used place names for its cars. The Cortina, for example, was named after a town in Italy.
For its largest passenger model of the 1970s, it chose the Spanish city of Granada. This did not go down well with the Granada Group, parent company of Granada Television and now, following a merger, part of ITV plc.
Granada took legal steps to prevent Ford using the name after the car had gone into production, but this was rejected by the courts. Ford continued to build Granadas until 1994, when it began calling its big cars Scorpios.
Ford Mustang
The current Mustang is the sixth in a line created back in 1962. The original was the first of what became known as the pony cars – powerful but reasonably affordable coupes aimed at younger buyers.
Both the class in general and the Ford in particular had equestrian names. A mustang is a feral horse now found in America but descended from animals brought over by Spaniards. The name seems to be derived from either of two Spanish words, both meaning ‘wild’.
Hyundai Kona
Hyundai’s naming policy is wide-ranging. Many of its current cars have one or two letters followed by a two-digit number, but its SUVs are named after places, as in the case of the Tucson and the Santa Fe.
The most recent Hyundai SUV is the Kona, which follows the same procedure. It’s named after a district (or actually two districts – the North and the less populous South) on the west of Hawaii’s Big Island.
The same car is sold as the Kauai (another Hawaiian island) in Portugal, where Kona sounds too much like a very rude word.
Jeep Cherokee
Given its image and history, it’s natural that Jeep should use words suggesting adventure and the big outdoors for its model names, such as Compass, Renegade and Wrangler.
The Cherokee and larger Grand Cherokee are different in that they are named after native Americans living in the south-east of the United States.
The origin of the Cherokee name is uncertain, but it may mean “people who live in the mountains” or “people who live in the cave country”. Cherokees call themselves Tsaragai, which sounds vaguely similar.
Lamborghini Huracan
Ferruccio Lamborghini was very enthusiastic about bullfighting, and gave his cars name which reflected his interest. Although he died in 1993, the company he founded still keeps up this tradition.
The Huracan is a recent example. The word is the Spanish for ‘hurricane’, but it was also the name given to a particularly fierce bull which fought bravely – and of course died horribly – at an event in Alicante on 3 August 1879.
Lotus Elise
The Elise was named after the granddaughter of Romano Artioli, who at the time of the car’s launch was the owner of both Lotus and Bugatti.
However, although Elise has definitely been used as a female name (as in the case of the opera singer Elise Ross), it’s not quite what Signorina Artioli was called. Her first name was actually Elisa, which was changed slightly for the car.
Elisa sat in the driver’s seat of an early Elise at its official unveiling. She was still a toddler at the time, and the top of her head was lower than the top of the steering wheel.
Maserati Ghibli
Maserati has used the Ghibli name three times, first for a grand tourer in the 1960s, then for a coupe in the 1990s and most recently for an executive saloon launched in 2013.
Ghibli is the Libyan name for a warm wind also known as the sirocco, which starts in Africa and blows as far north as southern Europe.
Maserati Quattroporte
Quattroporte is one of many Italian words which sounds far more dramatic than their English equivalents. It simply means ‘four doors’.
Maserati reverts to it every time it creates a four-door model. The first Quattroporte appeared in 1963, while the current, sixth-generation one was launched in 2013.
Mazda Bongo
Mazda started building Bongo vans in 1966 and has only just stopped doing so. An eight-seater called the Bongo Friendee can occasionally be found on UK roads.
The name has nothing to do with drums. The bongo referred to here is a large antelope which lives in various parts of Africa.
Mercedes G-Class
Mercedes generally gives single-letter names to its model ranges, though sometimes more letters are used. Roughly speaking, the further through the alphabet you go the larger the car is, so an S-Class is much bigger than an A-Class.
The G-Class SUV is slightly different. At its launch in 1979 (since when it hasn’t changed much) it was known as the G-Wagen, short for Geländewagen.
The word literally means ‘terrain car’ but translates better as ‘all-terrain vehicle’.
MINI Cooper
The connection between MINI and Cooper predates BMW’s takeover of the brand by many years. Charles and John Cooper started building motorcycle-engined race cars just after World War II and were soon dominating the sport at UK national level.
Later, they showed that having the engine at the back of a racer was better than having it at the front, and inspired a design revolution in both Formula 1 and Indycar racing.
The Cooper company also created a hot version of the Mini which went on sale in 1961. As well as being a popular road car, it won many motorsport events, most famously three out of four Monte Carlo rallies between 1964 and 1967. Current MINI Coopers, especially the John Cooper Works hot hatch, are in a sense tributes to those early cars.
MINI Countryman
Like the Cooper, today’s MINI Countryman SUV is named after a car first built more than half a century ago.
Two long-wheelbase estate versions of the classic Mini were introduced in 1960, but neither of them had the word estate in their name. One was called the Morris Mini Traveller and the other the Austin Mini Countryman, both names suggesting more suitability for out-of-town motoring than the saloon possessed.
Like the larger Morris Minor Traveller, and several American estates, both cars had exterior wood trim from the start, though they were later available without it.
Mitsubishi Carisma
Direct-injection petrol engines are common in today’s cars, but they were extremely unusual when Mitsubishi fitted one to the Dutch-built 1997 Carisma. It was the first car of the modern era to be sold with one.
Otherwise, it was very conventional. Possibly in an effort to disguise the fact, Mitsubishi gave it a name which sounded identical to the word ‘charisma’, a quality it noticeably lacked.
British journalists pounced on this and gave poor reviews to a car which did not entirely deserve them.
Mitsubishi Shogun
On sale across four generations since 1982, Mitsubishi’s large SUV is known as the Pajero in most markets, though not in Spanish-speaking ones where the word is a term of abuse.
It has never been known as Pajero in the UK either. Here it is sold as the Shogun (the name for top-ranking soldiers in Japan from the 12th to 19th centuries), possibly because we find that word easier to pronounce.
The same word has also been used here for the smaller Shogun Sport and the much smaller Shogun Pinin.
Piaggio Ape
The Ape is a small Italian commercial vehicle using the same mechanicals as Piaggio’s even more famous Vespa scooter.
Its name has nothing to do with monkeys. Vespa is the Italian word for ‘wasp’ and refers more to the scooter’s shape than the sound it makes.
Ape, pronounced “AH-pay”, means bee. Naming the truck after another insect made sense, and also suggested that the Ape could work harder than the Vespa.
Porsche 911
Porsche originally intended the 1960s successor to the 356 sports car to be sold under its project design number, 901.
It was actually displayed with this name, but Peugeot pointed out that it had the rights to sell cars with three-digit numbers where the middle one was zero, and had already done so for many years.
Porsche got round this by replacing the middle zero with a 1. It is still selling cars called 911, and Peugeot is still selling cars with a middle zero, so all is well.
Porsche Cayman
Despite what people sometimes think, the Cayman (essentially a Boxster with a solid roof) is not named after the Cayman Islands.
In fact, both the car and the country are named after the caiman, an alligator-like reptile native to Central and South America, with the third letter changed to a y.
When the Cayman was launched, Porsche announced that it was adopting four caimans kept in the Wilhelma zoo and botanical gardens in its home city of Stuttgart.
Renault Twingo
Renault has sold two generations of Twingo city cars in the UK, but it never officially imported the first, which launched in 1993.
Cheap, stylish and intended for young buyers, the Twingo had a name which, according to Renault, was a combination of twist, swing and tango, though it still works if you just combine the first and last of these.
Renault Zoe
Renault announced in 2009 that it would call its forthcoming electric city car Zoe, partly because it reflected “values of femininity” and partly because it stood for zero emissions.
Renault Zoe is a nice name, but the announcement outraged several French people. A student called Zoe Renault, and the parents of two younger girls also called that, took legal action, while a certain Sebastien Mortreus set up a petition demanding that Renault change its mind because using a girl’s name for a car was a “scandal”.
The court cases were dismissed and Renault ignored the petition. It does not seem to have affected French parents. According to L’officiel des Prénoms, Zoe is the 16th most popular name for French babies in 2017, just one place lower than it was in 2009.
SEAT Arona
Although it builds cars using technology shared across the Volkswagen Group, SEAT has a free hand when it comes to naming then.
With rare exceptions such as the Mii city car, its normal practice is to use the names of places in Spain. The latest example of this is the Arona compact SUV, which refers to a town in the south-west of Tenerife.
A similar policy has been used for other SEATs including the Alhambra, the Leon, the Marbella and of course the Ibiza.
Skoda Karoq
Skoda has recently started to use Alaskan-influenced names for its SUVs. The Kodiaq was named after the Kodiak archipelago and its native bear, one of the largest in the world.
A smaller and more recent SUV has a similar, though more complicated, story. In the language of the Alutiiq people who live on Kodiak Island, the word for ‘car’ is kaa’raq. Skoda’s logo includes an arrow, and the Alutiiq word for that is ruq.
Skoda combined the two words and changed the last vowel to an ‘o’ to come up with Karoq.
SsangYong Korando
Korean manufacturer SsangYong has used the model name Korando since 1969, though it first appeared on the UK market in a car with a Daewoo badge.
Korando does not mean anything on its own, but is a contraction of the phrase Korea Can Do.
Subaru Levorg
In a complicated process, Subaru created the word Levorg by taking the first and second letters of the word legacy, the third and fourth of revolution and the fourth and seventh of touring.
Almost from the moment the name was announced, journalists took the opportunity to point out that, when spelled backwards, it reads ‘grovel’.
Toyota Auris
Toyota built cars called Corolla (meaning the ring of petals around the centre of a flower) for over 40 years, and might still be doing so now if it hadn’t decided to call its new model of 2007 something else.
This was the Auris. Toyota derived the name from the word aura and from the Latin aurum, which means gold. The ending was chosen to match those of the existing model names Avensis and Yaris.
Possibly because of a confusion with Audi, Auris is sometimes pronounced “OW-riss”, but it is meant to rhyme with ‘Horace’.
Toyota GT86
The sports coupe co-developed by Toyota and Subaru is sold under various names around the world. Toyota includes the number 86, for example in the GT86 badge used across Europe.
This is a reference to a 1980s rear-wheel drive Corolla codenamed AE86 which, if fitted with Toyota’s 1.6-litre 16-valve engine, was a fast car for its time and notably successful in motorsport.
Toyota won the 1986 European Touring Car Championship Manufacturers’ title with it, while in the UK Chris Hodgetts secured the British Touring Car Championship with an AE86 in the same year and the following one.
TVR Griffith
The latest regeneration of the TVR brand is scheduled to begin with the launch of the Griffith in 2018. The choice of name as appropriate, as it has a lot of significance in TVR history.
In the mid 1960s, New York Ford dealer Jack Griffith created a new car by the same means as AC Cobra creator Carroll Shelby had done a few years earlier, fitting a big American V8 engine into a British two-seater. In Griffith’s case the car was the TVR Grantura.
The resulting monster was sold in the US as the Griffith 200 (later 400 and 600) and in the UK as the TVR Griffith. After a long gap, TVR resurrected the name for another V8 model built throughout the 1990s.
Jack Griffith died in January 2017 at the age of 90.
Vauxhall Adam
Like other modern Vauxhalls, the Adam (a smaller and more stylish version of the Corsa supermini) is actually an Opel.
It’s assumed that the name was chosen in tribute to Adam Opel, who founded the company but died in 1895, before it switched from building sewing machines to cars and bicycles.
In fact, Opel says that this is a coincidence, and that the car is called Adam simply because the word is easy to pronounce in all the countries where it’s sold.
Vauxhall Viva
The Viva is known in all other markets as the Opel Karl. This refers to Carl Opel, son of the company founder and one of the three brothers who decided to move into the motor business in the late 19th century.
As it occasionally does, Vauxhall decided not to use the Opel name. Instead, it chose Viva.
There were two reasons for this. First, it’s quite a jolly word, being more or less the Italian for ‘hurrah!’ Second, it has historical significance for Vauxhall, which sold Vivas across three generations between 1963 and 1979.
The third of these was the last but one Vauxhall designed entirely by the Luton company. Other than the 1972 Victor, all subsequent Vauxhalls have had varying amounts of Opel influence.
Volkswagen Beetle
The car everyone now refers to as the Beetle was originally marketed simply as a Volkswagen followed by a four-figure number such as 1200 or 1303. Because of its shape, Germans called it a Käfer, or beetle, and the name soon became popular around the world.
The first Volkswagen sold as a Beetle from the start was the retro-styled, Golf-based car launched in 1997. It had roughly the same appearance as the earlier car but was much larger and mechanically quite different.
The same applies to the current, third-generation Beetle introduced in 2011.
Volkswagen Scirocco
The Golf-based coupe has been built over three generations, the first two between 1974 and 1992 and the current one since 2008.
It’s named after the warm, strong northerly wind created by air from African deserts rushing up to fill low-pressure zones in the Mediterranean.
This wind is also known as the ghibli, so the VW Scirocco and Maserati Ghibli are actually named after the same thing even though the words are completely different.
Volvo Amazon
Nearly all Volvos have had model names consisting of numbers and, often, initial letters. In 1956 the company had a brief change of policy and called its latest saloon car the Amason.
This was the Swedish spelling of the word Amazon, referring not to the river but to the mythological female Greek warriors who, with remarkable devotion to the cause, were said to have had their right breasts removed so that they could more easily use a bow and arrow.
The choice of name went down very badly with a German motorcycle manufacturer which sold a moped called the Amazone and had the rights to use the name no matter how it was spelled. Volvo was allowed to call its car the Amazon (now with a ‘z’) in Sweden, but elsewhere it was renamed as the 120 Series.
Despite this, Amazon remains the popular method of describing the car to this day.
Volvo V40
Volvo’s current naming convention is not what it was originally intended to be. At first, the company planned to use single letters for body shapes (S for saloon, C for coupe and, in the case of estates, F for flexibility) and single-digit numbers for sizes.
By this process, a small saloon and its estate equivalent were at first named the S4 and the F4. Unfortunately, Audi already had the rights to S4, so Volvo switched to double-digit numbers and came up with the S40 and F40.
That didn’t work either, because there was already a Ferrari F40. Volvo dropped the F and used V for versatility instead. The V40 name is still used today, though the current model is neither a saloon nor an estate but a hatchback.