Look at the names on the flashy new cars on the auto-show circuit: Cayenne, Kahuna, Triant, Touareg, Navicross, OLV. Fetish?
The class of 2003 is singularly weird.
“I don’t know what I’d say if someone asked me what kind of car I had,” said Colleen O’Hagan, 48, of Windsor, Ontario, as she looked at Fetish concept from Venturi in Detroit. “Can you imagine? `I have a Fetish.’ I’d never admit it.”
Automakers regularly complain about rising costs and shrinking market shares. But names? It’s a crisis they rarely address.
“I think they’re running out of car names,” said Louise Ruetz, 44, an office administrator from Cambridge, Ontario.
Bad names, or the reliance on a seemingly random selection of letters and numbers, highlights a larger problem with the global auto industry: It is overcrowded, and too many vehicles are competing for buyers as well as names.
“Because all the great names are taken . . . some of the names are made up now,” said Jason Vines, an auto industry veteran and former chief spokesman for Ford Motor Co.
“What we’re doing is taking foreign languages and halfway translating them to English in the market and getting a new name. In this market that’s almost what you have to do because all the other names are taken,” he said.
Take the Touareg, a new sport-utility vehicle from Volkswagen. According to the company, the name is borrowed from a tribe of Saharan nomads.
“The name may sound strange,” said Jens Neumann, a VW board member responsible for the carmaker’s U.S. operations. “But we wanted to differentiate the vehicle from everything else.”
According to a company spokeswoman, it’s pronounced TOO-uh-rg.
“Too-wreck,” a self-assured man told his girlfriend, saying he read somewhere it was an archaic German word for auto-touring.
Then there’s the matter of what this name and that car have to do with one another.
If you think the connection between a $35,000 luxury SUV with a top speed of 140 m.p.h. and a culture whose name translates roughly as “abandoned by the gods” is a little sketchy, you’re not alone.
“I think they’re silly giving it a name like that,” said Margie Kuschmann, 57, a U.S. history teacher at Lutheran High School North in Macomb, Mich. “If the name is so obscure you don’t understand it or if you can’t pronounce it, what’s the point?” she asked.
For several years, auto industry analysts have warned manufacturers about the glut of models.
For consumers, the array has grown so large it makes car shopping even more confusing. For automakers, it has fragmented the market so severely that it makes matching buyers with car models an increasingly complex exercise.
Obviously, it also has taxed the linguistic capabilities of automakers. Consider the trend of dropping names.
Hyundai has the OLV, Infiniti the FX45, Cadillac the SRX, Audi the S4. Toyota not only has the FJ but, with its new Scion line, the xA and xB, as well.
They’re enough to make Maserati’s Kubang sound enlightened–kubang being the name of the wind over Java.
“The problem is almost everything is getting used up,” GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said recently. “If you have a good name, it can help. I’ve seen a lot of stupid names in my life.”
And to some consumers, a good name makes a difference. Like a savvy ad campaign, an effective name can invest metal, plastic and glass with an almost human character.
“You look at some of those names and you wonder what they mean,” said Lisa Perkins, a registered nurse from Flint, Mich. “TT? What does that mean? And the ML-Class Mercedes? Names have more personality. They stick with you. ST? There’s no image. You might know what kind of car it was, but the names don’t tell you much about the car. And nothing about its personality.”
Naming cars is not simple. Take the Maybach, DaimlerChrysler’s new ultraluxury sedan.
“What’s a Maybach?” asked Bill Fanning, 33, of Mt. Clemens, Mich. “I know it’s supposed to sound fancy, but it doesn’t really mean anything, you know? To me, it sounds like the first line of a bad joke.” (Maybach, by the way, is the name of the chief engineer for the first Mercedes car.)
Auto show attendees couldn’t come up with much themselves.
“I think it’s a Thugmobile,” said Len Naylor, 27, of Ypsilanti, Mich., as he pondered the eight-wheel, all-electric Kaz, “peace” in Japanese, from Keio University.
Ten-year-old Zach Copus, of Findlay, Ohio, thought the Mini Cooper S should be called the Furious, while Michael Joiner, 48, of West Bloomfield, Mich., said Buick’s Centieme would be better named the Flying Brick.
Michael Kiefl, 17, a student at Ohio State, and his father, also Michael Kiefl, opted for a formula to rename the Scion xB.
“It’s got to be a small, idyllic city in California,” said the elder Kiefl. “And it’s best if it ends with an A. How about Arcadia. Or La Jolla.”
“No,” his son chimed in, “no one could pronounce that.”
A bystander tossed in her 2 cents’ worth.
“A car that looks like this definitely needs a name, not just a bunch of letters,” 37-year-old Kalamazoo, Mich., resident Audrey Parkinson said of the xB, whose body is reminiscent of a 1950s milk truck. “That’s a face only a mother could love.”
