Bijoy takes aim at the name game
Alright, since I work for a car company it won’t be right for me to comment on cars produced by other firms. That said, as an honest car enthusiast I can dwell a bit into the car names, right?
Where do I begin. Ah, the Hyundai Venue. Brilliant isn’t it? Venue is okay, considering that they would certainly have discussed ‘auditorium’, ‘hall’, ‘theatre’ and even ‘ground’ before reaching there. But then, this is the car company that created a decent car and called it ‘Creta’. I haven’t gotten over that yet. Soon Hyundai will launch their first EV that answers to the name, hang on tight, ‘Kona’! Seriously, the nomenclature division at Hyundai has gone on a long holiday and the accountants are having a ball. Why accountants? Because I hate the bunch.
When a Chinese-owned British brand makes an SUV for Indian roads, the name it gets should come from Greek history, right? That explains Hector for you. Wasn’t it the British who taught us that cars are feminine?
I am seriously cross with Tata Motors too. See, Harrier is an iconic name and when I hear it, images of jump jets taking off from INS Vikrant come to mind. It is not right to use it for a car. I really don’t know the logic of Tigor and Nexon too but they are okay, Harrier is not.
So Toyota is badge-engineering a beautifully-named Suzuki called the Baleno. And, drum rolls, what are they calling it? Glanza! Is it me or do you also think of internal organs of the human body when you hear Glanza?
Audi, like Mercedes and BMW, normally sticks to alpha-numeric names, but got a bit creative and called their electric stunner E-TRON, which translates in French as sh**. Deal with it.
Perhaps I am nit-picking but why should anyone call a car Ciaz – even if the car has a reasonably good-looking rear end?
The electric two-wheeler start-ups are mushrooming in India. As they swim like manic sperms to reach the goal of financial funding, they need to have sophisticated names for their mock-ups, right? So, you have Revolt, Ultraviolette and Lightning striking our roads soon. That said, I do think Harley-Davidson got a nice name for their electric bike – Livewire!
While on the electric theme, if you think the Tesla models are named S, 3, X and now Y for no reason, you are wrong. Tesla is bent on putting the ‘S3XY’ ness back on cars. Got it?
Jaguar launches an all-new electric car and swept the World Car of The Year Awards. But what the I-Pace won’t win, in my opinion, is the Name Of The Year Award. (Quite a piece of kit, this one, by the way, with the equivalent of 394bhp and a range of 350km – Ed, can I drive one soon?)
While Superb, Octavia and Rapid are excellent names with er… superb recall, Skoda lost it completely with the Yeti. I really don’t know what prompted VW to call its sub-4-metre car Ameo though Vento is somewhat passable.
After building the Miura, Countach, Jalpa, Diablo, Murcielago, Aventador, Gallardo and Huracan, Lamborghini could only come up with Urus for their SUV. Slightly sad.
Rolls-Royce always stuck to names related to the ‘spirits’ after they earned the nick-name Silver Ghost some 100 years ago. And what stunning names – Phantom, Wraith, Dawn…. Alas when it came to building an SUV, the German owner threw history out of the window and called it ‘Cullinan’ after the largest rough diamond ever found. I personally think they should have never succumbed to building an SUV in any case!
On a personal note, I got a chance to name two customised Mahindra Thars – the first one was the Midnight and what followed was, obviously, Daybreak. And if you insist, I could have come up with a better name to the Innova contender of ours. Perhaps next time!
