It can’t be easy coming up with a name for a new car, that is probably why BMW has never bothered with it.
Unfortunately for everyone American manufacturers used all the best names on their muscle cars in the 1970s, so now we have ones like you see in this week’s Thursday Five - the five silliest car names.
Kia pro_cee’d GT
While Kia’s first attempt at a hot hatch is actually pretty good, you can’t help but wonder what went wrong in the naming department.
With a disturbing lack of uppercase and seemingly random punctuation, it is less a name and more of a seizure while using a keyboard.
Okay, so we know that it is based on the Cee’d hatch, but that only makes it worse - why lose the uppercase “C”? Why is the “P” lowercase? And what the hell is with the underscore?
So many questions, so few syllables...
Mazda Scrum Wagon
The Mazda Scrum Wagon is the passenger version of the Autozam Scrum commercial van and pick up that sells in the tiny Kei class in Japan. It is, in turn, a rebadged Suzuki Carry which, while a slightly silly name, at least makes some sort of sense.
The Scrum Wagon, hoewever, makes no sense whatsoever. And, yes, it IS named after a bunch of men hugging each other and trying to get a funny-shaped ball.
Why? Who knows? One thing is for certain though: you couldn’t actually get a rugby team into a Scrum Wagon, so not only is the name very, very silly, it is also inaccurate.
Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard
It almost seems like Isuzu realised their mistake when they first released the Mysterious Utility back in 1989 and only badged it as the “MU”. Don’t get us wrong, Isuzu MU is still a very silly name, just nowhere as silly as Mysterious Utility.
But then they went and named the five-door version the MU Wizard. While a Mysterious Utility Wizard sounds like some kind of weird reclusive old bloke who does magic tricks and cleans your windows at night, we know it best here in New Zealand as a saggy, smoking Japanese import.
And it seems Isuzu still haven’t learned their lesson - their current version of the Holden Colorado 7 is called the MU-X. But apparently it now stands for “Multi-Utility: Xtreme”. Which, let’s face it, is at least as silly.
Geely PU Rural Nanny
Most manufacturers go for butch, tough names for their utes, trucks and pick ups. Things like Ram, Ranger and Colorado do the trick nicely, sounding all manly and rugged.
Chinese company Geely had other ideas when it revealed an Aussie-style ute for the Chinese market - it went for silly and slightly effeminate instead.
To be fair, however, as far as utes go the PU Rural Nanny is particularly silly and slightly effeminate anyway, being based on the Daihatsu Charade platform and powered by a range of 990cc to 1.3-litre engines. Not exactly something that would get local tradies swapping their Hiluxes and Rangers for...
Honda That’s
Picking on Japanese Kei cars for having silly names is a bit like kicking a puppy - really easy and utterly hilarious mean-sprinted and unnecessary - but Honda was REALLY asking for it with this one.
The Honda That’s what? “A really crap name” would be the easiest answer, but there really is no sensible explanation for it. One thing we can be sure of is that it must have made for some seriously awkward and stilted conversations when someone asked an owner what kind of car they drove...