I don’t care what the darn thing is called. At the end of the day, it’s a car that I paid X dollars for and expect to provide me with X amount of driving pleasure. No more, no less. The name of the car doesn’t make it better or worse for me. Not at all.
The popularity of a car doesn’t depend on its name, either, even if the name in question is somewhere between stupid and insipid. Take the Fit, for example. Is this Honda hatchback in good health or prone to epilepsy? Another example is the Corolla. The petals of a flower are nice and all, but I find it hard to visualise them within the context of Toyota’s unpretty best-seller. Yet another example is the Toyota Sai, which has unfortunate connotations in Hokkien.
I remember when the Alfa Romeo 164 was rebadged as 168 for Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong because the original name sounds like “die all the way” in Cantonese. The deft rebadge turned it into “prosper all the way”. Either way, the big Alfa sold in very small numbers in Asia, so it didn’t matter even if they had called it the Alfa 188.
Would Ferrari supercars be any less desirable if they were christened after the characters in Gladiator? No, they would still be hugely desired by petrolheads everywhere, even though Ferrari Maximus, Ferrari Commodus and Ferrari Marcus Aurelius don’t sound quite as exciting as California, Italia and Fiorano.
Names also mean nothing in the real world. Imagine the most beautiful, most wonderful girl in your circle of friends is dying to be your girlfriend. Would you reject her just because her name is Frangipani Ni?
