One of my favorite urban myths is that the Chevy Nova failed to sell in Latin America because No Va, in Spanish, means won’t go. It’s not true, the Nova actually sold quite well, but it should have been!
Some car names just work – others, not so much.
In the 50s, Chrysler’s Plymouth division sold a lot of station wagons called the Suburban.
The name Suburban worked so well that GM appropriated it for their big Chevrolet SUV.
Back in the mid-70s, Honey’s uncle sold us his 1968 Ford Ranger Edition Explorer pickup. It was a beefed up Ford truck with an off-road suspension that felt like it had no springs or shocks at all. Without the big truck camper he had used it to carry, I had to haul several bags of sand in the back just to make it drivable.
A few years later, the Ford Ranger name was on a mini-pickup, and the Explorer was a mid-sized SUV.
In 2001, Honda was going to import the car they called the Fit in Asia to the European market.
Honda planned to call it the Fitta until they learned that Fitta is Swedish slang for female genitalia. They released it in Europe as the Jazz.
A few years before I retired, one of our technicians bought himself a new Toyota pickup. It was a sport model with the big Toyota Racing Development decals on the rear quarter panels.
He was proudly showing it off in the parking lot when one of our co-workers, seeing the big TRD on the side said, “You bought yourself a Turd?”
Since then I haven’t been able to see that decal on anybody’s truck without chuckling.
Other associations are even more subtle.
My wife almost never uses profanity and there are some words commonly used today that nearly cause her to swoon. She certainly has nothing against Volkswagen – her first car was a used Beetle that she drove for years – but the first time she saw a TV commercial for the Passat
she announced, “I could never drive a car called a piss-ant.”
No comments:
Post a Comment