[00:00] Modern car names are complete nonsense. It's like car names are basically just captcha image tests. You know, they're a ridiculous string of letters, numbers, or common words with copyrightable spelling
[00:14] that permeate the public consciousness until people forget that that's not the way you spell lyric. Where's the character of excitement, you know? The Interceptor, the Stealth, the Javelin, the Testarossa, the Mustang, the Fiero, the Corvette, the Camaro, the Fury.
[00:36] Car names used to sound like Metal Gear Solid's Snake Eater bosses, and they were all better for it. Even less exciting stuff like the Eldorado, the Riviera, and the New Yorker contributed to the idea that car names should be expressive and evocative and conjure an image in the mind that sums up that car.
[00:57] I talked about it in my re-recorded look at the failures of Henry Ford, that the attempt to name even a disaster like the Edsel required a protracted, all-hands-on-deck approach
[01:11] that somehow involved employing an actual poet to contribute suggestions, because it felt deeply important to get this right. Companies used to treat names the way YouTubers treat titles and thumbnails.
[01:26] as this thing to pull out their hair and wring their hands over, because I could put all the effort in the world into a video, but none of it could end up mattering if I get the packaging wrong,
[01:40] which, to be fair, could be cope. But the point remains that it used to feel a lot more vital to get the name right, even just 25 years ago, than it feels now,
[01:52] where companies name cars the way a preschooler solves a word search, by just circling letters and combining them into a string of incoherent, consonant nonsense. And okay, maybe you could argue that's better than some of the alternatives of yesteryear.
[02:08] After all, a name is a first impression, and you don't want that first impression to be, Hi, my name is Chrysler TC by Maserati. No, I'm not a perfume. But I can be if that'll make you like me better.
[02:21] And I feel it's important to acknowledge that not every automaker names their cars in these uniform, homogenous, alphanumeric ways. But I ultimately feel like we're in a wonder-starved imagination recession for automotive nomenclature.
[02:39] Because who could possibly care about any of these cars with names as simultaneously forgettable and ridiculous as the 1995 major motion picture Theodore Rex?
[02:53] EQE, EQS, GB, GX, LX, IX, SLC, SLK, BZ4X. Like, are we talking about cars or looking up books using the Dewey Decimal System?
[03:07] So I'll go over what are, in my opinion, some of the absolute worst car names of the last 15 years or so, before exploring what's causing all this, and why the auto industry might actually be changing its mind.
[03:23] We can rant if we want to, we can send our best regards, cause your friends don't rant, and if they don't rant, then they're not into cars. BMW has never really gone with expressive naming conventions, to the best of my knowledge, relying instead on good old numbers to communicate class and model.
[03:44] But the BMW iX has the overthought, clout-chasing stench of a brand that's been swallowed by private equity, even though I know that private equity has nothing to do with it.
[03:56] They're publicly traded for crying out loud, but it just has the vibes of the name you come up with when you're trying really hard to appeal to people who make how they hydrate part of their personality.
[04:09] And really, I think it's the X of it all. The IX, the XM, the IXM70, the X-Drive, the X-Drive40, the X5XDrive40E.
[04:22] It's like the think tank was composed entirely of Elon Musk and a bunch of 12-year-olds hopped up on red dye 40. If I wanted a bunch of exes in my car, I'd go into my contacts and make some uncomfortable phone calls
[04:36] to ask about road trip availability for people whose contact info I should have deleted ages ago. Yet it's not nearly as bad as the Honda E-NY1.
[04:49] or the Honda Anyone, which sounds like a title for a cancelled Kingdom Hearts spinoff. True story, I wanted to Google to see if Honda even still makes this European electric SUV anymore,
[05:04] and when I typed this into my browser, it came back as File Not Found because it thought I was searching for something on the eDrive of my computer. And I'm sure there are dumber names that I'm just not thinking of,
[05:18] But for me, this has got to be the one. For me, it's the one. The any one. Because by the time people figure out what it is you're trying to say, they'll realize it wasn't worth the long walk to get to that explanation,
[05:33] nor is it really worth all the intellectual bandwidth it would take to try and suss out why a company would do this, nor is it worth the space in the storage of your mind that would be required to retain any information about it.
[05:47] Not that you could access it anyway, because you've already ejected the E drive. And I get that they were going for naming the architecture of their EV platform, the E colon and then capital N,
[06:01] and then using the number 1 to designate this as the first model for the platform. But it just doesn't work. In my opinion, it doesn't work at all. And I guess Honda doesn't think so either,
[06:13] because it appears they're winding this down and preparing to close the curtain on it in some markets. But okay, that's just one stupid car name. What happens when there are several in a single line
[06:28] all with the same gauche naming scheme? That, my friends, is how you get the Cataract IQs. And yes, I'm grouping all of Cataract's IQ-ending names as one
[06:41] because to me they're all equally stupid. but also because they represent a very common naming convention that you used to see a lot in the late 90s and early 2000s in other forms of media,
[06:54] back when they would pluralize with a Z instead of an F, essentially creating a copyrightable spelling for a common word. Orbits, lugs, brats, boys, both in the hood and two men,
[07:10] along with boys of both the Hardy and Dudley lineage. It's youthful, edgy, extreme, but starting with an X instead of with an E. And it's relatable, because the best way to get ahead was with a Z.
[07:27] But now it seems like when you want to make something sound new, you just throw on an IQ. Okay, I guess to Cadillac's credit, it does seem like they're at least trying to use words that evoke a kind of mental image about the
[07:43] car in question but Cadillac Optique Optics whatever it both sounds weird and looks weird I mean we could be talking about an electric SUV or a mobile optometry office It impossible to tell
[08:00] And frankly, I'm not taking a risk of entering anything that might have one of those eye doctor devices that blow that little puff of air into your eye. Never has something so painless been so manifestly unpleasant.
[08:15] But okay, forget about the optique. Optic? The Cadillac Vistik is hardly any better. It sounds like a science fiction author wanted to rip off the concept of a Star Trek holodeck, but didn't want the name to be legally actionable.
[08:30] And then you have the Lyric, which I've kind of gotten used to hearing, but then I've gotten used to my knee clicking. That doesn't mean I like the sound. The Cadillac Lyric is the automotive equivalent of those newfangled celebrities
[08:43] who sound entirely fictional, yet they're apparently real people, and there's a new one of them every week. There's an Ella Langley, but also a Stella Lefty, and they have the number one and number two signs on the billboard chart
[08:57] at the time I'm writing this. Yet if you told me neither actually existed and were simply creations of a teenage fan fiction writer on AO3, I'd believe you. We made men named PewDiePie and Mr. Beast impossibly famous,
[09:11] yet the names never sound entirely real, and neither does the Cadillac lyric, nor does the Cadillac Celestic, which sounds like a line of Hot Topic permanent body jewelry. I guess what I'm
[09:25] saying is that while Cadillac isn't the only offender here, what with the Hyundai Ioniq as an example, they're definitely the worst offender of the IQ-shaped lot, in my opinion, although I
[09:38] suppose I should be happy that Cadillac has not yet gotten to the point where they've renamed the company Cadillac. But moving on, there is the Toyota BZ Woodland. What are we even doing here,
[09:54] Toyota? What is this? The BZ4X was bad enough, and in theory I should be shouting it out here instead of the BZ Woodland, although I am using the BZ Woodland to stand in
[10:08] for the entire Beyond Zero Emissions line. Because what do you mean you're now doubling down so that we get this BZ Woodland who's... I'm not sure what I'm even supposed to be getting from this name.
[10:21] I do in a sort of abstract sense, you know, it sounds kind of outdoorsy. It's a sort of off-road SUV that's electric because you can't just name an electric car something normal. You have to make it sound more alien
[10:34] so that the marketing department has to do even more heavy lifting to talk the EV agnostics into the church of electrification. But I guess my issue with it is that the name just looks incomplete.
[10:48] If they stopped trying to make Beyond Zero a thing and just called it the Toyota Woodland EV, I actually think that's not the worst name in the world. hell put the BZ at the end if you're going to insist on trying to make such happen at least
[11:03] then people might see it and understand that it's your branded terminology for an EV but even then this just seems goofy to capitalize the Z but use a lowercase B again going back to that 90s
[11:17] 2000s naming style of oh it's a Z that's so cool it's look at it it's so edgy you could poke an eye out with its edges, and then have to go pay a fortune in eye doctor bills. Hey, is that a Cadillac
[11:31] optic? Yet, none of this annoys me half as much as the category I'm calling Mercedes Captcha cars. You know Captcha, that string of letters and numbers you have to enter into your browser to
[11:45] verify you aren't a robot, because you went into incognito mode so nobody could see the kinds of things you were looking at on the family desktop. These cars are just a string of alphanumeric
[11:57] nonsense, and it's kind of a byproduct of Mercedes' utilitarian approach to naming, because just one look and you would instantly be able to know the class and the body style. And yeah, that's fine in theory, but it's not so easy if you're trying to keep track of model
[12:14] generations whose nomenclature keeps changing. You see, the GLC is for the C-class model of the GL line, but this used to be the GLK, while the GLE used to be the M-class and the SLK became the SLC,
[12:32] and then you do the hokey pokey and fart into your hand and throw it at your neighbor or whatever. It's not impossible to understand, but it's kind of obnoxious. But then they started using the EQ designation for their EV line, yet they didn't do enough to meaningfully distinguish between the
[12:51] different models that used that designation. Case in point, at the same time Mercedes was marketing the EQE SUV, there already was an E-Class electric sedan called the EQE, but then there was also the
[13:07] EQS SUV and the EQS sedan, which not only created confusion with the EQE, but confusion between the respective EQSs, even though their names ended with either SUV or sedan. It's been theorized that the
[13:26] subsequent market confusion for these models had negative impact on sales for both the EQS models, Which makes this among the few times in modern history that I could find where having the wrong name might have actually hurt sales in ways you can't blame on mistranslation in foreign markets.
[13:44] Which, believe me, we are going to talk about. But while I could probably go on forever talking about the randomly generated password stylings of the Volvo EX30, EX40, and EX90, the Genesis GV70, the Genesis Electrified GB70, not the GV70 EV, but the Electrified GB70 because the word electrified had to be up front for some reason, and the unfortunate bathroom connotations you get from the scat pack,
[14:14] I can't talk about dumb naming conventions without calling out Pulsar. I get that it makes sense to name things sequentially so that it gives you some idea of where we are in the hierarchy of technological advancement,
[14:28] similar to how you instantly know an iPhone 11 is better than an iPhone 6, or at least it's supposed to be. But naming things in chronological order is profoundly stupid, whether you're an auto company or whether you're George Foreman.
[14:43] naming each of his sons incremental versions of the name George, especially when it's this easy to confuse details you should be able to glean from such a basic naming structure.
[14:55] Even something as simple as the model line's pricing hierarchy or the individual car's size is not immediately apparent in the way that Polestar names its vehicles.
[15:08] You would never know a Polestar 4 is actually cheaper than the Polestar 3 just from hearing the name. It's like Polestar just decided to name their cars like PlayStation consoles
[15:21] and then didn't actually structure their progression like PlayStation consoles. Which, to be fair, I guess Polestar's incremental naming structure at least makes more sense than the Xbox console numbering progression,
[15:34] but I don't think that's a terribly high bar. I genuinely don't understand why they do it this way. And maybe somebody smarter than me can explain it in the comments. I guess they have access to metrics that tell them this works I mean they not changing it with their upcoming cars even though now would probably be the time The Polestar 6 name doesn tell you it a hard
[15:58] top convertible, nor does the name Polestar 7 tell you it's a premium compact luxury SUV. I think the simplest way to put it is just to say that there's not really any prestige to
[16:11] communicate here. It's just the brand name, and that brand name has to do all the heavy lifting. Now, if you have a brand name with a lot of goodwill and a lot of prestige and a lot of
[16:23] leverage, that's great, but if you don't, I feel like that has the potential to work against you. And this provides a nice segue into what is arguably my entire point in making this video,
[16:35] which is to figure out why this is happening, why the parameters for what constitutes creativity in automotive naming appears to have changed. Because I don't get excited about making a video unless there's some kind of central question to answer,
[16:50] or a problem that needs solving. Maybe it's because I've always secretly wanted to be a detective, but don't have the time, patience, stomach, memory, insight, perception, rationality, exhaustion, tolerance,
[17:02] memory, active listening skills, interpersonal skills, problem solving, observation, or memory to do it. But one of the reasons I think car names suck now, if it could be said that they
[17:14] suck more now than they might have before, is that brands want to emphasize the brand. Because if you don't remember the model names themselves, then you're forced to remember the brand. In this case, Polestar is the thing you remember, and then the number. A Mustang will
[17:33] always be a Mustang rather than a Ford, but a number can never take the place of the brand name. You'll never call it the 2. You'll call it the Polestar 2, or just the Polestar. In the same way,
[17:49] I think people are more likely to call their Mercedes a Mercedes than an EQS. This sort of all ties into the second reason I think this is happening, and it can be traced to a statement in 2012 by Johan de Neichen, who, at the time, was president of Infinity, which is a crazy job title.
[18:08] It's kind of a long explanation, and I've linked it in the description, but his statement basically boils down to the fact that Infinity needed new names for a planned product expansion, but they found it was becoming more difficult to find names that weren't already spoken for
[18:23] in the auto industry. Additionally, with smaller engines becoming more powerful, in some cases far more so than the larger ones, quote, It would be a bit odd to have a powerful, luxurious,
[18:36] and refined V8-powered Infiniti M56 then position a new, high-tech, 550-plus horsepower performance flagship for the Infiniti M range above it
[18:49] using a potent, charged induction V6, but then call it Infinity M30, which we would be obliged to do, following our current naming logic.
[19:01] End quote. In essence, they were trying to avoid the same confusion that would later plague Pulsar and their incremental naming convention. But perhaps the most insightful part of Deneichen's statement is that,
[19:17] as a consequence of becoming a more globally recognized brand, their research suggested that new customers were unable to make sense of their hierarchy, since you weren't really getting a sense of where an EX fit into the grand scheme of things
[19:31] versus an FX or a G or an M, and so Infinity came up with a workaround. Quote, So the solution is pretty straightforward.
[19:43] Use Q for cars, QX for crossovers, and double digits in increments of 10 to denote hierarchy linked to the price point of the model, not size and not engine displacement.
[19:59] End quote. But okay, that's infinity. What's the rationale of other automakers? Well, the most obvious one is something I alluded to above,
[20:11] and it's the one everybody knows is a problem. It's that different words have different meanings in different languages. Imagine that. So corporations have to be very careful with what they name their products,
[20:25] or else you end up with Spanish-speaking countries getting the Mitsubishi Pajero, which is basically the equivalent of saying that it's the Mitsubishi Gooner. Or, you guess, the Mazda La Puta,
[20:40] which is a very unkind thing to call a woman, much less a Mazda. Now, contrary to the story about how the Chevrolet Nova translates to the Chevrolet doesn't go and fail to sell in Spanish-speaking countries because of that name,
[20:58] it still sold beyond GM's expectations in Spanish-speaking countries. So it's really about critical thinking here, because I don't think anybody thought GM was literally selling a car that wouldn't go and was telling you as much.
[21:12] It was just an unfortunate coincidence that could be the subject of humor, but unlike so many other cars that have suffered from unfortunate connotations in other languages, it wasn't anything that was actually explicit or profane.
[21:28] But problematic naming extends to non-Spanish-speaking countries as well. I mean, the Mitsubishi Town Box is basically what a bully calls your mother in 10th grade, and the Honda Fit's original name of Fita has very non-safe-for-work connotations in Scandinavian countries,
[21:46] saying deal with the meaning of the Hyundai Kona in Portuguese. Meanwhile, the e-tron suffix that Audi uses basically mirrors étoile, sorry for the pronunciation, which is the French word for turd or excrement.
[22:02] So it kind of makes sense to go with alphanumeric letter jumbles whose names are either coded designations or acronyms whose individual letters each represent a different aspect of the car.
[22:14] But even in these cases, negative connotations can still be difficult to avoid, like with Mitsubishi once again, as they released the Mitsubishi i-Miev,
[22:26] which stands for Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle. While it didn't share the exact same letters, Because phonetically, some found it to be awfully close to mef, the German word for a bad smell.
[22:40] Which really sounds like the kind of thing that gets brought up in sales advertisement at Kunkelman Chevrolet. Come on down to Kunkelman Chevrolet and get your crusty nuts in a smelly EV. $10,000 down, $25,000 due at signing.
[22:53] Did somebody drop a booty bomb in the backseat of your bluebeam? Is somebody testing your car in the gluteal wind tunnel? You'll never tell. The only thing we'll tell you is to get your unwiped ass into the finance office so we can talk numbers over a styrofoam cup of over-roasted Green Mountain coffee
[23:08] caked up with a Jersey Shore's worth of sandy powder creamer. Let go of ever seeing your family again, that punk! Come in Chevrolet, busy bee, you go stirring motorcars, recommending a Lee Martin Chevrolet again. The globalization of a car's name and its function as a classification system
[23:23] make it so that simply calling something a Mustang or a Camaro isn't really enough anymore. It needs to describe what the car is, no matter where you are in the world. And sometimes it needs to communicate the brand's mission as well.
[23:38] Which brings me back to Toyota because this is how you get cars like the BZ4X Which needs to explain Toyota EV architecture its size and car type Now as established BZ is for Toyota Beyond Zero Emissions program 4 is for its RAV4 equivalent
[23:59] size, and the X is to denote that it's a compact crossover SUV. But then, for some automakers, they also have to communicate hierarchy, like what you see with Genesis.
[24:12] For the GV line, the G obviously means Genesis, the V means versatility, and then the numbers are arranged to specify its place in the hierarchy, with the idea that lower numbers place the emphasis on athleticism,
[24:28] while higher numbers are more about elegance, according to the 2021 press release for the GB60. So by this standard, the GV60 is the athletic model, while the tire numbers are the fancier ones.
[24:43] It's almost like these names are more for the automaker to keep track of what they're selling than it is for the consumer to be able to understand what it is they're potentially buying in the first place.
[24:57] But my own personal pet theory for why I think names are weird now is that it's because of EVs. And I don't have a problem with EVs. I love EVs. But I just wish the auto industry was more clever
[25:11] about how they communicate that a thing is an EV because they want you to be able to know that a car is electric without them having to actually say that it is. Mercedes was more or less positioning the EQ line
[25:25] to serve the same sub-branded function as your AMGs of the world. Yet they couldn't just call it their EV line for whatever reason. They had to create their own branding, in this case EQ, which stands for Electric Intelligence,
[25:41] and which is ironic because it's communicating manual stupidity, unless a Q is an I in a different language and nobody told me. Oh, but on the subject of I and Q, Cadillac admitted that they were doing the same thing themselves,
[25:57] stating in a 2023 press release that the IQ naming strategy was a way of, quote, introducing a different type of ED to the market, one that works in tandem with people's daily lives and environments, end quote.
[26:13] And they do all of this overthinking, yet I think Volkswagen, of all companies, already came up with a cleverer way to communicate the same message with the ID Buzz.
[26:26] I mean, there are a lot of words that evoke electric imagery, you know? Like, they could have called it the shock, or crackle, or hum, or watt, or megawatt, or gigawatt. But Buzz is sort of understated and brilliant.
[26:41] I just love that. And for their part, Volkswagen is the reason I sort of have hope that it won't be this way in perpetuity with EVs, and with cars in general. On the one hand, plenty of auto brands still do old school names,
[26:56] like Nissan with the Armada and the Frontier, and Dodge with the Durango and the Charger and the Hornet, but other brands are releasing entirely new cars that suggest some measure of thought
[27:09] rather than the shake-and-boggle container approach. While I don't know if they're good cars, I can at least appreciate the Subaru Trail Seeker and the Subaru Uncharted, even if my immediate instinct is to question why you would give that name to an electric crossover SUV
[27:27] that hardly looks rugged enough for an REI parking lot. But even if it did look more of a part, I'm not sure it makes sense to give it a name that suggests you have no loving idea where you're headed.
[27:39] But that's just nitpicking, honestly. I mean, I guess it's to convey that with this car, you can embark upon journeys of discovery. The world doesn't require a map. unless you're trying to find a charging station.
[27:53] Either way, I appreciate the effort. And it brings me back to Volkswagen, because Volkswagen seems to be the brand that is openly admitting that the writing is on the wall with regards to these weird names.
[28:07] You see, a year ago this month, in September 2025, Volkswagen declared that they weren't going to continue to solely rely on numerical names for their ID line, but begin affixing established names to the line.
[28:22] While this is kind of dicey, or it could be, in the sense that an EV gives an automaker an excuse to just slap any heritage name on an electric model, even if it doesn't actually fit that branding, like people have accused of the Mustang Mach-E,
[28:36] the Volkswagen press release about the ID Polo and the concept car known as the ID To All admits that they're taking this approach in order to create models whose names, quote,
[28:52] arouse emotions and are anchored in people's everyday lives, end quote. Granted, I'm not sure how ID Polo does this, but I guess I'm just happy any time a company decides to use an actual word
[29:07] instead of just numbers or an acronym. But ultimately, a name by any other name is still just a name, right?
[29:21] So we probably shouldn't take it so seriously. I mean, car enthusiasts probably don't have a hard time distinguishing between different models and trims and packages and all that stuff.
[29:33] But then, not everybody is a car enthusiast. Some people legitimately don't know. Like an older parent who goes to GameStop and instead of the latest Xbox, she gets you an old GameCube because they're both describing a three-dimensional shape with six faces.
[29:48] And if we're being honest here, enthusiasts are absolutely capable of getting these models confused or losing track of what each one is supposed to represent within a brand's hierarchy,
[30:00] present company included. I am an eminently confusable man. But I guess if I wanted to be fair to automotive corporations who have to exist in a time where most good ideas have already been thought of,
[30:12] I would say that it's understandable why names are what they've been for the last decade plus, when a name has to not only fit into a worldwide hierarchy within the brand and its models,
[30:24] but also survive trademark and unfortunate localization issues. It's why brands are leveraging their previous names by pulling them into the future because it's easier to use an old name like Bronco
[30:38] and trade on whatever goodwill or prestige it can still offer. In a way, that's kind of depressing, but also entirely justifiable. Because, well,
[30:50] it just feels like car names aren't intended to actually sell us on buying cars, but are simply being used to help the brand catalog them. If you liked this video and want us to make more of them,
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[31:21] Or chatting me up in the comments and giving me your own personal picks for the worst car names ever. and your theories for why they're so bad now. Thank you so much for watching,
[31:34] and have an outstanding rest of your week.