The Best Car Names Are Strictly Personal
Why Do We Nickname Our Cars?
My friend Elana has an old, green Dodge Polara, a big late-Sixties Mopar muscle car. Once, while driving near her house in hilly southern California, she sped right by a police car. But the cop didn’t seem to notice. This prompted a passenger to suggest that the officer probably didn’t see the vehicle because it was so large and verdant, he thought it was just part of the landscape. Now, she sometimes calls the Polara, The Lawn.
“When people really relate to or identify with their car in some way, there’s an incentive to give it a nickname,” said David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon, a highly respected nomenclature firm that is responsible for helping to create some of the most recognized brand names in contemporary consumer culture. These include Sonos, Pentium, Swiffer, and BlackBerry, as well as automotive icons like Scion, Lucid, Outback, and Ridgeline. “That’s someone trying to put a human face on something that is the opposite of human.”
Cars receive nicknames for all manner of reasons. Often times, they’re descriptive, especially keyed to color. My friend Bob had a red Jeep that he called Reggie, a kind of conjugated diminutive of the car’s hue and brand. My Uncle Earl had a green Triumph TR7 that we called Froggy, which is similar to the nickname my friend Michael’s daughter gave to his grassy Lotus Europa, which she called Kermit. My brother Scott had a fourth-generation white Honda Civic, from the windswept aero era of the late Eighties. He called it Tomago, which is Japanese for egg.
“When people really relate to or identify with their car in some way, there’s an incentive to give it a nickname.”
Functional nicknames like these are “highly legible,” a factor that Placek’s firm holds in high esteem when dealing with clients. “I’m sure if you surveyed people with just small cars, you’d find a lot of nicknames for things that were small—ant, bug, bee,” he said. “Certainly, smaller cars should have smaller names like Fit or Bolt, names that are quick and efficient, because a small car should me more efficient in terms of fuel economy, zipping through traffic, parking.”
But sometimes nicknames tell a deeper, more obscure story. After he finished his urology residency, my friend Michael bought a BMW M3. His wife Theresa nicknamed it Mr. Johnson. My friend Eric had a 1990s Honda that he called The Catabatic after the persistent downhill Antarctic wind, mainly, he says now, “for some mix of irony and grandeur.” And my friend Brian had a Jaguar XJR that was once admired by Thomas Harris, the author of the Hannibal Lecter books, at a B&B in Maryland. Brian nicknamed the Jag, Clarice.
“If a nickname is something obscure or compelling, it can help prompt a conversation,” Placek said. “The name isn’t the story. It sets the owner up to tell the story.”
But sometimes, things are just a bit more straightforward. My friend Matt has a car that he calls Piece of Shit. Placek found this one quite legible. “I’m assuming ‘Piece of Shit’ wasn’t a new Ferrari.”
The contemporary nomenclatural trend in new cars is to give vehicle models alphanumeric names like GLC300 or X6M50i. This, Placek says, is to enunciate the prominence of the main brand, Mercedes-Benz or BMW. But, none of the humans I spoke to for this story gave their car such a nickname. The closest may have been the moniker I invented for one of my father’s company cars, which he received as a pharmacist working at the local Perry Drugs chain in Detroit. It was a late Seventies Chevy Nova, with a license plate that started with the initials, TPM. We called it TPM: The Perry Mova.
Placek reminded me that neologisms, made-up words—or what Lexicon refers to as “coined solutions”—work best when they play on something recognizable and are simple to pronounce. “They need to be fluent from a processing standpoint, with good flow, a good combination of consonants and vowels, easy to pronounce.”
I’m not sure if Mova fits into that rubric. But I ended our conversation by asking Placek if he has a nickname for his own car. “I don’t. To me, it’s just my BMW,” he said. “I try to turn the naming switch off when I leave the office at night.”