The five coolest car names in Kiwi showrooms

Tuesday, 20 February 2018

We miss the old days when cars had proper names. Luckily, there are still a few.

Maybe the whole industry has just run out of ideas, but most modern car names are either made-up amorphous words or letters and numbers. Boring.

Back in the day, cars used to be named after actual things - often, things that told you a lot about the character of the vehicle they were attached to. Didn't that make them seem so much cooler? Luckily, there are some models that still have monickers with meaning. Here are five of our favourites.

Stinger

Kia's hard-charging rear-drive Stinger has been a surprise in so many ways. Not least because there's a very cool badge attached to the back. This, from the company that gave us the Optima and Cerato.

Skoda's little SUV achieves perfect balance of cuteness and weirdness with Yeti badge.

**READ MORE

* Does Stinger scratch that RWD itch?

Little Lamborghini, you are like a hurricane. So that's what we called you. Perfect.

* Skoda makes a Karoq from cardboard

* What's underneath the facelifted Mustang?**

Outback name gave Subaru's jacked-up wagon the right image from the start. Even outside Australia.

'Stinger' not only sounds the business when you say it, but it encapsulates the character of the car perfectly: the name was obviously chosen for its 'sting in the tail' connotations, but stinger is also the name for those spikes the police use to puncture tyres and end high-speed car chases. Yep, the Stinger is Kia's bad boy.

Yeti

Ford's Mustang is all-too-obvious on any list of great car names. And yet still essential.

People who talk about the new Kodiaq being Skoda's first SUV seem to have forgotten all about the Yeti, which has been around since 2009. Maybe that's because it's a strange shape rummaging around in the wilderness, bearing only an approximate resemblance to a normal SUV.

Naming its quirky medium-SUV after the mythological (maybe) creature of the Himalayas was a stroke of genius by Skoda. Sadly, the name is being dropped for the Yeti's replacement in favour of Karoq, mainly to fit in with a new k-and-q badging policy (it's a blend of Alaskan names for 'car' and 'arrow', a reference to Skoda's logo).

Huracan

There's a long tradition of Lamborghini naming its cars after bulls and bullfighting - right back to 1966 in fact, with its first-ever supercar (and arguably the first supercar of any kind), the Miura.

The German-owned Italian maker stuck to Spain for the Huracan, but left the bull behind. 'Huracan' is Spanish for hurricane, which tells you all you need to know about this mid-engined super-sports machine. By the way, it's pronounced 'oo-rah-can', with the emphasis on the last syllable. Huracan is also the Mayan god of wind, storm and fire.

Outback

Arguably the first true 'crossover' vehicle to reach the mass-market, the 1994 Subaru Legacy Outback was a wagon-cum-SUV. The Australian-inspired name gave it just the right sense of adventure - especially since it was really aimed at the American market.

It was a brilliant name and it stuck. While Subaru Japan continued to call it all sorts of strange things (Grand Wagon, Lancaster), the rest of the world simply called it 'Outback'. And of course with the latest model, Subaru doesn't even make a Legacy wagon any more: it's Outback all the way.

Mustang

Surely the most predictable entry on any list of cool car names and yet essential all the same: 'Mustang' still makes people go weak at the knees.

But does it reference the P-51 plane or the horse? Nobody really knows, but according to Mustang historian Bob Fria, designer John Najjar suggested it as a tribute to the aircraft. Ford bosses thought that a bit nerdy (we're paraphrasing), so he repitched it with the horse association and got the thumbs-up. Hence the horsey badging on the 'pony car' launched in 1964.