It has to be the Tata from India. When guy doesn’t think “female anatomy” when they hear the name?
I so agree. I have often wondered why car models seem to have to get named by the most word-deaf person the company has on staff, as if it were obligatory to embarrass me to ever have to tell somebody what I was driving, even if the car itself might actually be pretty good. Volkswagen seems an egregious offender; I can’t imagine what “Passat” means in any language, or what a car might have to do with golf in any language, or whether I even want to know what the connection might be between Porsches and Boxers. Or why Japanese cars must have squirrely non-word names made up by computers, or why even people who supposedly speak English don’t speak English; eg, the “Traverse,” which is both a real noun and a verb, but the spokesman always pronounces the car’s name, a proper noun, as if it were the verb form. Or “RAV 4;” nice car, but what the hell is a rav, anyway? Or “Sportage,” the kind of portmanteau coinage a middle schooler might make up, that gets pronounced like “portage” but looks like a French word, that should be pronounced accordingly, to anybody who has ever been around the block. I could go on…
RAV supposedly stands for Recreationally Active Vehicle.
Lame? Yes, but when the vehicle was brought to market, that was the explanation given in Toyota press releases.
The japanese are not that imaginative in naming new products. Years ago I has a Japanese pencil sharpener in my office. The name? P S!!
Tata is actually the familiy name, going back many years. They may change the name of the car when they start selling them in North Americica.
My wife was surprised that when we lived in Asia, her favorite “Oil of Olay” lotion was called Oil of Holay!
I take two prescription drugs from international drug firms. Both had different names in Asia, although chemically identical. The price was also 1/3 the North American price.
How about the Chevy Lumina. could they have come any closer to Lemon. one of my friends had one and it was a Lemon.
Datsun means rabbit in Japanese. Volkswagen already did that one.
I noticed that Nissan has the words for numerals 2 and 3, that is “ni” and “san”. Though the words are the chinese-derived numerals, that is part of my knowledge of numeralology in the Japanese language. The subject of numeratives is rather complex but that is what I see in the Nissan moniker. Wonder if that applies to is derivation?
It’s just my opinion of one name and I don’t want to offend any owners but Tercel, associated with turtle and …; even a movie joked about it. Maybe it was a reliable car and probably one of those models that had to be renamed for the export market.
If I have to pick on Mercedes-Benz it would be the lack of imagination for the vehicle names. They are simply designated alpha-numerically. It’s left to the owners to name their MB anyway. I’ve known many named Otto and Heidi.
Actually, a Tercel is a type of hawk.
I understand that this car was very popular with Ornithologists.
A “Hummer” should be very popular with you guys.
Yeah…does anybody remember the Vega? Who made that car anyway? And really, what does it mean? My biggest vote would also be Volkswagon;
The "Golf"
The “Thing"
The"Touareg” did I even spell that right? I bet they consulted Brett Favre on that one…equally hard to pronounce =-)
The Vega was an ill-fated Chevrolet attempt in the 70s at a small car that would compete with the VW Beetle. A number of our posters bought this car in good faith and suffered the innumerable problems of bad design and even worse quality.
I came close to buying one but found the trunk too small and ended up buying a Malibu.
Vega means star in Spanish. Las Vegas literally means “the stars”.
As a Vietnam vet, I can assure you that KIA is absolutely the worst car name ever. Just in case you don’t know, KIA is the standard military acronym for “Killed In Action”.
One of my current favorites is the Murano - usually pronounced as morono?
Chevy tried to sell the Nova in Mexico and it didn’t sell worth a darn -
Nova means NO GO in spanish!
Yugo - really means you can go if you get out and push!
How about the ‘Powder’ Duster?
or the old Plymouth Cranbrook - what a dumb name.
I’ll surely come up with more.
Yugo is short for Yugoslavia, of course. It was the only car built in that country during the Tito communist era.
Cranbrook is a city in British Columbia, Canada, and Canadians rather liked a local name used by Chrysler. Similarly, the Saratoga was named the “Windsor” in Canada, since it was built there, in Windsor, across the river from Detroit. Canadians associate Saratoga mostly with potato chips.
Apologize to all for the misinformation I provided on the Nova. However just today on NPR via BBC they had a list of the same worst car names ever and Nova was discussed as I had. Also: Didn’t know the Cranbrook would offend anyone. Thank goodness they didn’t name it after some of the cities/towns in my area; Plymouth Moundville, Plymouth Peculiar, Plymouth Ten Mile, Plymouth Deadrick, Plymouth Hog Eye. Actually my Uncle had one for many years and it was a good old car.
Later!
Wow!
I can’t believe how many people still fall for that old chestnut about the Nova’s poor sales in Spanish-speaking countries. That tale is simply not true.
Whenever I hear something questionable or fishy repeated endlessly, the first thing that I do is to go to the “Snopes” website where these urban legends are thorougly researched. Sometimes these tales turn out to be true, and most times they turn out to be false. The “NO VA” legend is just one more of those bits of common knowledge that are false.
For some reality, take a look at:
While you are there, you can research all of those other fables that you have heard over the years.
My dad had a '55 Porsche. Porsche was fond of names that helped people distinguish one model from another when, in those years, the only distinguishing factor was perhaps a five horsepower difference in three or four engine states-of-tune. So we didn’t have the Speedster; we didn’t have the Carrera; we didn’t have the Super 90 … our Porsche was dubbed 1500 N, where the “N” stood for NORMAL.
Some car rag of the day in '70 tried to say that the word Datsun was a Japanese semi-imitation of the word Austin, as if to imply that the 240Zs and the 510 sedans were aimed at the British car maker Austin. But by that time the Austin Healey was dead; the Austin Marina was never anything but a failure; and the Austin Mini was nothing like the Japanese offering. All I remember is that right out of the box the 240Z started wiping TR6s and Porsche 914s off the racetracks in SCCA C Production, and the 510 was the choice in the under two-litre sedan classes.