Clyde on Cars
A good part of the auto industry is built on the significance of brand names. I keep track of manufacturers’ car names and what they mean, or what the manufacturer wants them to mean.
Let’s take the best-selling car in America. It’s the Toyota Camry. If you look in Webster’s New World Dictionary it’s not there. It must be a made-up word from the marketing department. The word has class and power in our society, because it’s a remarkable car with great resale value.
The name I like is Buick’s Roadmaster. Great name, you could hog the road with that monster, but very few people bought it, and now you only find it in auto junkyards or museums.
Canary is close to Camry, but manufacturers don’t call cars after birds. There is a Plymouth Jeep Eagle and an Eagle Talon, but even though you fly down the road in a car, manufacturers don’t name them after birds. I can visualize a car like a Chevrolet Crow, Plymouth Pigeon or a Dodge Duck.
GMC provides names for its sport-utility vehicles that are appropriate. GMC off-the-road vans are called “Safari” to ride in the bush, “Savanna” for the flat open treeless plains, “Sierra” for the mountains and “Yukon” for Alaskan dirt roads.
Ford Motor Co. provides All-American names for its cars, and you can find the names in the dictionary. Ford provides Explorers, Rangers, Expeditions and Excursions, all modern-day covered wagons with plenty of horsepower and enough space for soccer moms and their hordes of teen-age athletes. Ford also provides an aristocratic atmosphere with the Crown Victoria. The only sales for this regal sedan seem to be to police departments and older women, and not Queen Victoria.
Chevrolet provides some great names. It originally had everything start with the letter “C” for Cavalier, Camaro, Corvette and Chevelle.
Now you have the Astro van, Blazer SUV, Impala, Lumina, Malibu, Metro, Prism sedans and the Suburban SUV. You can’t provide a better name for a pick-up truck than Silverado, with its rugged individualism for sagebrush lined roads of the old west.
The bottom line is that Chevy attracts the solid middle-class buyer who has no great pretensions of wealth or status. You can find a Chevy in every square foot of the midwest and east, but not too many are found here in California.
There are other manufacturers who are right on with the name. Acura with its Integra, Buick with the Park Avenue, Chrysler with the Town and Country and Concorde, and Honda with the Accord and Civic Coupe for the commuter.
Other good names are Nissan’s Pathfinder, Oldsmobile Intrigue and Pontiac Grand Am and Grand Prix. Finally, for good names you have, Volkswagen’s new Beetle coupe and the Jetta.
When you look for distinction in a foreign import, you don’t go by names. You get a number with a letter next to it. The combination speaks volumes for those in the know. From Lexus you can get an ES, GS, LS and SC.
They don’t give them away, but the price varies when you put a 300 or 400 next to the letter. If the 300 is too much for you, then the 400 is definitely out of your league.
As long as you’re shopping numbers, take a look at the 328Ci from BMW. Maybe the 528i will catch your eye. Saab has the highest numbers in the industry with the 9000 SE Turbo. The number matches the price.
The car with the best name was Pinto. The Pinto is a nice horse, but it was a lousy car. My teen-age neighbor had a hatchback that bucked like a bronco and backfired like a Howitzer.
