Unfortunately Named Cars

Unfortunately Named Cars

As a car fan, I enjoy learning about the significance of the names that cars are given. Many names have interesting etymologies. From the Corvette being named after swiftly moving Navy ships to the Shelby Cobra being named after a dangerous snake, many car makers get the names just right. Then there are cars like the Plymouth Duster, Ford Probe, and the Chevy Nova. These cars have names that are easy to spell, easy to say, but they have no sense of coolness at all.

Despite the fact that the Plymouth Duster was a pseudo-muscle car, it was given a less-than-muscular name. A duster has nothing to do with cars, but everything to do with cleaning the house and wearing a coat. Dusters remove dust from tchatches and mantles. They are often made of feathers or soft cloth. In the world of fashion, dusters are long coats or sweater that are so long they “dust” the floor. Dusters should not be cars, unless they are the ones that are cleaning up the dust that are left behind by cool cars like Corvettes and Cobras.

The Ford Probe is often tagged as the car with the worst name ever. Cars are not designed to investigate closed spaces. Even though Ford was attempting to give the Probe a space-aged name, they only made the car sound like a tool that aliens used to look into the human body. Yikes! It is almost as if Ford could have called the car the Ford Rear-End Investigative Device for Alien Learning and Superiority and gotten the same reviews for the name.

The Chevy Nova is another unfortunate name. Like the Ford Probe, the people at Chevy tried to cash in on the space-age names that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the Probe, the Nova was not a good choice, not because of the space reference, but because of the Spanish translation. The verb “ir” in Spanish means “to go.” When you say “no va” in Spanish, you are literally saying “no go.” Huh…why didn’t Chevy think of this?

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