Five Things: completely made-up car names

Monday, 3 August 2020

Some car names have deep meanings. Others, like these five, are completely made up.

When it comes to thinking up a name for a car, there are any number of options – you can go the boring alpha-numeric route like the Germans or get a bit more interesting and name it after a place, animal, celestial body or even a weather pattern.

Or you can just do what the makers of these five cars have done and just make up an entirely new word!

Mitsubishi Starion

Nope, the Satrion didn’t get its name from a mispronunciation.

Contrary to popular belief, the Starion didn’t pick up its name because of a misunderstanding bought about by Mitsubishi engineers struggling to pronounce “stallion”.

* Is your car worth a hashtag?

Crouching Tiger, hidden iguana: the Tiguan’s name is very weird indeed.

* Five Things: legendary supercars the AMG A 45 S is pretty much as quick as

* Five unfortunate car names

This misconception was only compounded when Mitsubishi used horse imagery in the Starion’s marketing, but there is a very good reason for this – “Starion” is a contraction of “Star of Arion” and Arion was an immortal horse in Greek mythology.

While a Camaro isn’t actually a small vicious animal, we wish it was.

In fact, the cover of the original 1984 sales brochure specifically says “The name Starion – derived from the combination of star and Arion, Hercules' horse in Greek mythology – symbolises a sense of the universe, and of power and high performance.”

Volkswagen Tiguan

Volkswagen is a bit of a fan of just making new words up for its vehicle names, be we reckon the Tiguan is their best effort yet.

Someone forgot to tell Alfa Romeo you don’t use capital letters in the middle of words. Even made-up ones.

In terms of weirdness, that is.

When it came time to choose a name for its then-new SUV Volkswagen ran a competition in German magazine Auto Bild to find something that would accurately reflect the fresh character of its exciting new vehicle.

And for some reason it used a word that was a portmanteau of “Tiger” and “Iguana” (or, rather, the German for Iguana which is Leguan), which… is just weird.

‘What I do have is a particular set of skills’. If you laugh at the Taycan’s name it may ominously threaten you over the phone.

Chevrolet Camaro

While we are all very used to “Camaro” – and it even sounds vaguely Hispanic - it is in fact a totally made-up word that was created when GM tasked its marketing team to come up with a name that started with a C. Simple really.

GM would later try to retrospectively bring meaning to the word by claiming that it was French slang for friend, pal, or comrade. Which it isn’t.

However, we think the best definition was when a GM executive told journalists at the launch that a Camaro was a small, vicious animal that ate Mustangs…

Alfa Romeo MiTo

This one is a bit different, because ‘mito’ is actually the Italian word for ‘myth’, but as you can probably guess from the MiTo’s silly mid-word capitalised T, that isn’t really what Alfa was going for.

While originally called “Junior” while under development, Alfa Romeo came up with the name by taking the first two letters from the names of two Italian locations that were significant in the car’s creation, so got ‘Mi’ from Milan, where it was designed and ‘To’ from Torino (Turin) where it was manufactured.

It was just lucky that it wasn’t designed in Cremona and manufactured in Aprilia we guess…

Porsche Taycan

More made-up names from the wider VW Audi group, but at least this one has a bit more relevance to the car. Sort of.

Roughly translated as “the soul of a spirited young horse” in Turkish (‘Tay’ means a spirited young horse and ‘can’ means soul), you can at least see where Porsche was coming from with its name for its new performance EV as its advertising campaign bangs on about “soul, electrified” and things being wild, untamed and spirited.

So there you go: a name that encompasses all things wild, untamed and spirited but also sounds like a Liam Neeson movie.