Yes! We name our cars. Cars have personalities and the names fit. Our 84 Dodge van was Betsy. My Z-28 is Lola (the sexiest name I can think of). My daughter has Rhonda the Honda. My son in law’s SUV was Remmy, for Remmington Steele. I think most car names should be feminine, but it depends. A pick up, like Mark, could be masculine.
My name is Phil from Wyo. I have a associates degree in automotive technology and have work in some shops. I don’t think vehicles are soulless, as matter of fact, I think that most vehicles have something about them that makes them unique, which allows them to become more than just a machine. I have named most of my cars and none of my trucks, but I feel that not every vehicle should be named.
I own a 68’ Ford truck which my grandpa bought from a man in 69’ brother Tim named her Grin dole and I also have an 89’ Toyota corolla wagon AWD
dirt brown, that has a GPS rigged in for the speedometer. My brother in law bought it for four hundred dollars and gave it to me and my wife as a wedding gift. The guy he bought it from is a professional rock climber who didn’t want to put to much money into it and he got it from a gunk yard who got it from some who wreck it with forth thousand miles on it and all it really was a bumper, some lights, a
speedometer cable and hood latch. After all these people had there fun with it, my brother in law who builds land cruisers up to do some serious off roadin
took it camping and had his fun with it, gave us the car he named, The Dirtbag, and I like it. I don’t think vehicles have to be male or female, just its own history and quarks to become more than just a machine.
Phil from the windiest state
Of course! But none were male/female.
1958 Delta 88 “The Bomb” Burned more oil than gas.
1956 Chevy “Willit” Will it start? Will it run?
1962 Ford Fairlaine “The Blue Beast” And it was!
1964 Buick “Cream Puff” Well, at least it was beige!
1968 Ply Wagon “Moby Dick” The white whale, of course.
1966 Buick Special Coupe “The Silver Shaddow” I repainted it metalic green but kept the name.
In 1987 the Buick finally died and I’ve been in mourning ever since. I’m now on my third Honda. The first two were unnamed but, inspired by your recent show, I think that I will name my 2007 Civic Coupe “Silver Shaddow II”. I just love this new car and I just realized that maybe it’s because it reminds me of my last “coupe”, the buick.
George
Cherry Hill, NJ
Of course cars should be named but most people do not understand car anatomy. Vehicles with four doors are male and those with two doors are female. If they are not named correctly it can cause great shame and embarassment. Some cars will be vindictive and revengeful and could cause problems. My first was a 1948 4 door Mercury, named Karl Kar. Next was Margeret MG then Portia Porsche, Freda Ford, Mark Mercury and on to my present car Christofer Chrysler. I hope this clears this up for you.
THE CICADA
is what my wife and I named our 1999 Mercury Sable wagon.
Very few cars in either of our driving ‘careers’ have been named, but THE CICADA is an exception. One look at the bug-eyed front end, brilliantine green paint and big, loopy, wing-like rear side windows, and that was that.
We also briefly had a beige 1961 Chevy Bel Air 4-door sedan that we called THE HEN. Seemed to fit. It kind of ‘clucked’ along, which turned out to be the contribution of #5 cylinder, which had ZERO compression.
We sold it and bought another '61 Bel Air, teal in color and restored, which has no name to date other than “the Bel Air”.
Go figure.
No doubt about it – absolutely – naming one’s car is a good thing to do. But this can be difficult, and I’m still stymied trying to figure out what to name my new car. My last car was a Corolla wagon that I had for 17 years and put about 270,000 miles on…this was Little Blue. Prior to that I drove a Mazda hatchback named the Jet Car (which it was NOT). But now, what to name my 2007 blue Prius? At first I came up with Tinkerbell (after all, the Prius is sort of bell-shaped). But Tinkerbell or variations such as Tink or Tinker just didn’t work. Then I thought, well, maybe just “Blue,” in honor of it’s predecessor…but this doesn’t feel right either. Any suggestions are appreciated.
As to assigning a sex, hmmm, I’m not sure about that.
Nancy
I’m with you, Tom & Ray. I have never named a vehicle I have owned. Seems silly to do so.
Absolutely cars deserve and need names. For instance, our 1960? VW bus, was called GOBUS. We talked to it everytime we got to a hill - gobus, gobus. Our current vehicles are named well, the 99 SAAB convertible is Kemosabe and the Acura MDX is Max. The sex depends on the vehicle. They clearly appreciate their names.
While this trait obviously varies from individual to individual, I’m not sure what causes it to arise in some but not others. Neither my father nor mother ever named their cars, but my two sisters and I do.
Interestingly, I never thought to name my cars…but driving down the street one day with my first car ( a new 2000 Camry) I distinctly heard it say, “Hi! I’m Sherman!” I nearly rearended someone. It was then that certain individual traits began to make themselves evident and ever since then I have paid attention to who my cars are. (And for the record, no I don’t generally hear voices =)
It takes time though and you have to wait for those traits to manifest. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t; I don’t believe that every car has a personality, and I don’t believe that every driver has the whatever-it-is to recognize it.
My brand new 2007 Camry SE (which is loaded with all of the extras: Lowered, sport-tuned suspension, sport seats, sunroof, spoiler, etc) is Cassie. The fact that she’s a she was quite shocking… until I realized that all the guys really like her, often referring to her as “sexy” =) Well, she knows that I’m the only guy for her, so a little envy from other guys is a good thing hahaha!
One thing that I do know is that, once you name something, anything, you have endeared yourself to it - it’s a fundamental human trait. Growing up on a farm, you never named an animal that is someday going to be dinner. Right? It makes it tough, if not impossible, to see “Babe” the pig turned into links or Donald the Duck appear on the dinner table stuffed with breadcrumbs =(
So, yes, I believe that those owners who do name their vehicles would in general tend to take better care of them due to having been endeared to it.
Of course you should name your car! How else do you talk to him/her when there’s trouble?
I’ve had cars since 1968, as shown below:
A 1956 Buick, named “Gentle Ben” because it was huge and my dad and I covered the green/green in black, and he was a “bear” to drive as there was no power steering!
2 Volvo Sedans, one gold, one blue. The gold was “Miss Emily” and the blue one “Mary Ellen”, both named after characters on the Waltons TV show. They both had the personality of the character they were named after.
1981 RX-7 named “Steve” after “Steve Trevor” of the Wonder Woman series - both of them were sleek, good-looking and fast!
And currently, my favorite, a 1995 Ford Taurus sedan, Forrest Green, named Forrest NOT because of the color, but because all I want him to do is “Run, Forrest, Run!”
I’ve also owned a cars I did not name, mostly because they had no personality (Yes, cars have personalities and vagaries all their own, just like drivers!):
A white Corvair owned in the late 1960’s
Tan Volkswagen beetle owned in 1975-76
Red and white Jeep Commanche owned in 1975-76
Tan Dodge Dart owned 1975-76
Dark blue AMC Eagle owned 1991-92
My parents always named the car, but never the trucks. The cars, however, were always named the same - Bessie!
It’s much easier to relate to your car with a name. Believe me, they know the difference - 
My first car, a 1982 Toyota Celica (purchased for $100) with a GREAT little 22R engine int it didn’t have a name. Neither did the little VW Fox I had for a while. But my third car, a hand-me-down 1991 Chrysler LeBaron (possibly the only one in existence which was NOT a convertible) we named “The Land Shark”, or “Great White”, due to the fact it felt like riding in a boat. My little green Ford Ranger doesn’t have a name yet but he’s a guy, I’m pretty sure. My partner has a white Chevy Astro work van (250K+ miles - the thing is a TANK) named “Snowflake.” "Snowy for short.
Yes. If you name your car you are then able to bond with it plus it gives you someone to talk to when you?re driving alone. I?ve been heard saying, ?C?mon Casper, you can do it.? while 4-wheelin? in our ?91 4-Runner. I?ve found no difference when using male or female names.
Cars we?ve had:
Ethel - 1985 green Caddy (she made us think of Ethel Mertz from I Love Lucy)
S*#thead - 1974 Nova (He was one!)
Earl - 1971 LTD (License plate had the letters ERL)
Gerald - 1974 F150 (Gerald Ford - duh!)
Ray - 1981 Chevette (bought him from a guy named Ray)
Dyna - 1968(ish) Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 (?nuff said)
Casper - 1991 4-Runner (We stole a window decal of a ghost at Halloween from Taco Bell . It lived on the inside of the windshield for 14 years.)
GiGi - 1998 Audi Avant (She was our ?grocery-getter? hence…G.G. turned into: GiGi. This German auto was a bit offended by her French name and subsequently cost us thousands. She has a new home now.)
A car?s name must come to you naturally. It cannot be forced, you can?t open a baby name book and choose it; it chooses the car. If you allow it, it will happen.
As a kid I read a book where one of the characters was a junk dealer that named his old pickup truck “Richard the Deep Breather”
My current car is a brown buick Century; totally unremarkable.
I call it “Richard the Third”, as in “…a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”
David in Minneapolis
I have 3 sedans and 1 minivan. My wife referred to her Mazada Protoge sedan as “Gerry” (pronounced with a hard ‘g’) because the tags on that car had a letter sequence phonetically sounding like that. But it doesn’t matter anymore because we sold it to our 24 y.o. son and the car’s name is the least of its worries now. Her Honda Civic Si we call “Si” (prononced “Sigh” like what you’re probably doing right now as you read this.) I have a Mazdaspeed 6 so creatively we call it “Speed.” The van is just “The Van.” Note, it’s not “Van” but rather “The Van” as in “I’m taking the van.” These names are not really some act of anthropomorphising but rather a means to avoid verbiage, like in this missive, that would otherwise be necessary to clearly and unambiguously designate the vehicle in question. I’m starting to hate this pole. My kids always ask “Why do you call the car this or that” and now you’re doing the same.
you know, I have an interesting quandary, my family has owned three cars that were dubbed the Red Mule ( 1995 Dodge Caravan, dark maroon) the Grey Ghost ( 1999 Saturn, silver) and the Silver Hornet (2000 Honda Accord, also grey) now you tell me if any of these have a gender? Because our family often owned mroe than one car at a time, I think the main reason for the naming was so that when one of us was going to town and was taking one car or another - we could just holler out the name and make it perfectly clear which car was going. entertaining discusission, thank you! oh and also - I can certainly verify that while cars and trucks have no ‘soul’ old tractors certainly do - or even if they don’t they have enough personality to make up for it!
The new hybrids will need one of those gender neutral names like Pat. After all they do go both ways…
David in St Paul
Well sure, if you want to. And if you don’t believe in it, don’t do it!
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…we’ve named some and not others. And I’m not sure why. Currently my husband and I are driving “the Honda” and Rosie, our 10-year old red Nissan pickup.
We onced owned a 1979 Cadillac Coup de Ville. Her name was the Queen Mary, in reference to her need for big parking spaces. The 1979 Toyota Corolla we owned during the same period was called Blue, for obvious reasons.
However the most interesting car name in our marriage was that of a 10-year old brown Datsun station wagon my husband brought home after a visit to our mechanic. My husband had been struggling with a VW rabbit pickup that had serious electrical problems and was frequently dying in inconvenient locations at inconvenient times. How could a rabbit be such a lemon?
The mechanic towed it in, and after examination, offered to trade it straight out for the Datsun. Frustrated after months of “rabbit” trouble my husband agreed and proudly drove it home. It was a dull brown with oil stained carpet in the back as a result of the car engines it had hauled for the mechanic.
Reminding my husband of Jack, who traded his mother’s cow for magic beans that grew into a giant beanstalk, I suggested we name it “the Magic Bean.” We called it the Magic Bean (or the Bean for short) the entire time we owned it.
Only wooses or women give their trucks female names. My 1950 Dodge pick-up truck was named “Dogie” (as in “Git along Little Dogie”). Others have been named “Red” (the lone Ford) and “Mac”. My ancient Chevy II Nova was named “Ol’ Blue” - the only car with a female name was a 1953 Ford with a wore-out manual overdrive that tended to roll backwards when trying to go from a stop on the slightest upgrade (I didn’t have three feet). Her name was “Nelly” as in “Whoa, Nelly!”
My current vehicle is a Dodge Caravan. The day after I named it “Ram” and attached a RAM head emblem to the bug deflector, I was backing out of my drive to go to church when an old lady in a Buick swung 2-3 feet over the centerline as I stopped to shift into Drive. “RAM” took out the whole left side of the GM product. All I had to do was replace the tail light lens.
Well, I guess it depends. My husband and I have 2 cars(daily drivers), 1 vintage Jaguar XKE convertible (for fun), several motorcycles and 1 1987 Isuzu Pup truck named Dixie. Out of all, the old truck is the only one with a name and I love it.
My father gave me the truck many years ago, when he purchased a new F150 for himself. My husband and I live in Indianapolis, but my family is from the deep south. The thought of this truck making a long journey to the midwest sounded like an adventure. So we came up with the name Dixie, which really felt like the right thing to do.
I am really not sure if we considered whether Dixie was a male or female, the name just made sense to us at the time. Often my father would call and ask, “How is Dixie doing?, Is Dixie doing ok with the cold weather up there? etc. etc.” Note: Dixie did just fine in cold weather.
Dixie is not terribly pretty and a little worn with over 150k miles. But it is a great truck and really gets used quite often. Dixie often travels to get mulch, flowers and countless Lowes and Home Depo trips DIY stuff. Dixie does not have air conditioning, but loves to have the windows rolled down, heck who needs air conditioning when you are working outside all day anyway.
My father died of brain cancer several years ago, so Dixie has become even more cherished. When I take Dixie out for a ride, I think of my dad, so Dixie is very special.It was not that long ago that I found a hand written note from my father buried in the glove box of Dixie. My father was meticulous about maintenance, so he had written out a future schedule for the oil and filter changes for us, as well as documented the specific type of oil brand to use.
My husband keeps telling me that Dixie will not last forever. Every year she gets more difficult to start. My husband just spent 3 days trying to figure out why she would not start. On the 3rd day, he was just about to give up (so very frustrated) and then he changed out something really simple and Dixie started right up. When you drive Dixie, it’s always best to carry a can of ether for emergencies.
So to answer your question about names. I think if it makes sense to name your car and feels like the right thing to do, then name it.
Would I name another vehicle? Probably not.
Because of it’s name, do I take better care of it? “No, Dixie is special to me, but all our cars and motorbikes get equally good care.”
The small little Isuzu pup truck deserved a name because it represented a time and place in history that was special ? the start of a new life in the Midwest.
The naming of vehicles is time-honored tradition. It gives interest and color to our travel. Ships have been given names for centuries. Pilots in war-time gave names to their planes. Space ships have names. Think how much the telling of our history is enriched by the phrase, “the Eagle has landed.”
I suggest that giving a name to a car will enhance the experiences (or at least the telling of the story in years to come) you will have in your car. Imagine how much color it would add to say, “I was barrelling down the levee road, doing eighty-five in the ‘Orange Tank,’” or “I pulled up in front of her parents’ house in my trusty Camaro, ‘Lothario.’”
I’d like to sahre the story of how I came to name and later rename one of my own cars. A few years ago, I bought a 1955 Cadillac sedan. It was painted a dour, dark Arlington green, listed slightly to the port side, and showed many signs of having lived a full life, including a Fred-Flinstone-style emergency braking option (…think about it).
When I first took it to my mechanic, I overheard him refer to the car as “el barco” to his Spanish-speaking employees. He didn’t know thatg I’d had a couple of years of Spanish in college, and that I knew “el barco” meant “the ship.” I laughed and told him I understood. He was a little embarrassed and quickly apologized. I told him there was no need, that it was perfect. I told my wife about it, and she agreed. Thereafter the car was no longer “the Cadillac,” which just seemed pretentious anyway. It was now “El Barco!”
Over the next couple of years, “El Barco’s” engine was rebuilt; so was the suspension. Rust holes were repaired. It got new upholstery. Stainless was polished. Bumpers were rechromed, and it got a beautiful new, two-tone paint job, a light “mist green” for the body and a dazzling “arctic white for the roof.” The car looked much less heavy, and its performance and handling was a lot less ship-like.
“El Barco” just didn’t fit anymore. Now, in the maritme world, it’s permissable to rename a ship after it has been refitted. I decided to follow that tradition and think of a new name. It didn’t take long. I decided to name it in honor of grandmother who drove a car exactly like it in the fifties and early sixties. I rechristened it “Trudy.” The name fits like a glove - evocative of the era when the car was built and significant of family history.
It’s so much nicer to say, “Let’s take Trudy,” instead of “Let’s take the Cadillac,” or “let’s take the green car.”
And as for the gender of the name, vessels are always female even if the names are masculine. The USS Abraham Lincoln and the HMS Prince of Wales, for example, are still referred to as “she.”
I think there are two reasons people tend to overlook naming their automobiles: 1: Cars, unlike ships and space craft are mass produced - in the millions, and therefore are seen as common and unworthy of names. 2: Auto companies name cars for us. Both of these reasons are, I believe, misguided. Afterall, children are mass produced by the millions every year, and they pretty much all look and act alike at first. Yet we name them because we know better. Soon they will develop personalities, and be unique. And why should we let car companies tell us (and our friends and neighbors for that matter) how we should think of our cars (and by extension ourselves)? No! I say let us break the bonds of conformity and, even worse, anonymity. Let our cars reflect the uniqueness of the adventures we will have in them. Let us name or vehicles!