"My European aunt spent 4 years in Japanese prison camp in Indonesia, and had a permanent hatred for all things Japanese for the rest of her life."
Well, that’s understandable. Hope she got through it okay.
I don’t think that many people even knew the name Nissan before they changed it.
The very first Toyotas sold in America were called Toyopets.
yeah I know.
She did and lived out her years in peace in chilly Holland. She really missed the tropics where she spent most of her life.
Tom McCahill of Mechanix Illustrated tested one and thought it was some sort of joke, a Japanese car! As they say, the rest is history.
What’s worse is that they actually spelled it Aztek, with a “k.” And that opens the whole can of worms about using First Nations names as brands: the Jeep Cherokee, the Ford Navajo, Pontiac etc.
Imagine if car companies used names like the Toyota Mormon, the Chevrolet Chassid or the Volkswagen German.
" Tom McCahill of Mechanix Illustrated tested one and thought it was some sort of joke, a Japanese car! As they say, the rest is history."
He was right. At that time, Toyotas had approximately one redeeming quality: they were inexpensive to buy. They rusted out quickly, and were not cheap to maintain. But Toyota matured over the last 50 years and now makes fine cars.
I always thought the Honda Prelude was a bad name. Why settle for an introduction when you can hold out for the main performance? Later, I learned that the Prelude was the introduction to the Acura Integra. Now that was the performance to wait for.
Yes, Japanese car makers had a lot to learn; the first Datsuns vibrated badly at high speed and burned their engines out quickly on California freeways. Fast, sustained driving was unknown to the Japanese due to their road conditions. Nissan withdrew all their cars for a year and solved those problems, but they were still rustbuckets until federal law forced them in the mid 70s to provide rust warranties.
Japanese were also unaware about all the things Americans do with and in their cars, including reproducing. So Nissan had a market researcher live with a typical US family for one year and record all their car-related activities. The result was much improved products, more legroom (Americans are bigger than Japanese!)
This is the secret for success; build what the client wants and needs. Movie star Clark Gable was the first American to own a Jaguar XK-120 in 1949. It overheated in LA traffic. It was not until 1963 that Jaguar added two cooling fans to the XK-E, the successor to the XK-150. All the preceeding models overheated in California, their biggest market.
The folks who cast the movie “Wayne’s World” were looking for a car as dumb as the 2 main characters. The Pacer fit the bill admirably!
“Voiture” is more or less equivalent to “automobile,” while in Quebec the informal word is “char” (pronounced “shar”), derived from “chariot” (“shari-oh” in French.) Obviously “char” and “car” share the same DNA.
You’ll hear both “char” and “voiture” used interchangeably. Don’t know if the word “char” is used in France. Probably not.
Sorry Doc, but there’s a lot of exaggeration and oversimplification going on here. Cuisinart, for example, is not a generic term. It’s one brand of food processor. The French word for “food processor” is “robot coupe.” The Academie francaise may dictate what the generic word for “food processor” can be, but I’m sure they have no authority over particular brand names, especially since Cuisinart is a perfectly good fusion of two French words, “cuisine” and “art.” If they don’t use that brand in France, it’s probably for marketing reasons of one sort or another.
But yes, the Academie does tend to dither and fuss, and by the time they decide that a “VCR” is properly called “magnetoscope” in French, everyone in the French-speaking world is already calling it a VCR. Did you know that in French the “Internet” is properly called “le reseau des reseaux,” the network of networks? Neither did anybody else, not even in Quebec City or Paris.
Also, why pick on “ordinateur” (“organizer” or “organization-maker”)? I frankly think it describes the device much better than the archaic word “computer,” and it’s the generally accepted French term, unlike, say, the laughable “hambourgeois” for “hamburger.” Is there some rule that everyone needs to accept English technology words to be hip?
And by the way, I’m an English-speaking Quebecker, so I’m not grinding any political axes here. I just don’t like gross overgeneralizations.
Obviously I hadn’t read the posting above about the Studebaker Scotsman when I wrote this.
Bermuda was the name used for the wagon models of the Edsel, IIRC.
Yes, this is true. The Bermuda name is an Edsel model but no other vehicle used that name after Edsel.
Let’s see?
There was the Buick LaSaber
Then the Buick LaCrosse
Then the Buick Lucerne
When does the Buick Latrine come?
Tester
The guys at BBC’s Top Gear recently built their own electric car.
v.1 was called “Geoff”
v.2 (after rebuild from rolling into a tree) was named “Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust”
picture: http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2009/11/ithrust.png
Reverse aerodynamics…cool. Travel only with the wind and use the drag.
car makers should focus on making good cars and not making up silly names. but check out this new Audi A5 commercial - it looks pretty cool and shows ya ho not to kill yourself in an Audi:
I was so smitten in the 60’s by the SAAB approach to auto engineering at the time, by not only their cars but their names. What better approach than to name your cars then by number. I bought new a SAAB 96 and later a new SAAB 99 over a BMW 2002 and Volvo 240 I believe. For me, a math teacher at the time, it was all in the numbers, and I was hooked; until the maintenance costs were to much for me. Contrary to the post…these are the best names. How can you argue with a company whose car model may just be a number or two away from a jet fighter ?
I guess they never want to sell another car ! That’s sad.