Five car company names with unexpected origins

Tuesday, 27 November 2018

A lot of car companies are named after the bloke that started them, which is rather boring really (Sorry Henry). Although the exception is Emil Skoda, who named his car company after himself, despite his name meaning 'harm' or 'damage' in Czech. Top marks there, Emil.

However, here are five that have more interesting backgrounds to their names.

Toyota

So let's start with one that is named after its founder after all. Well, sort of.

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Toyota started out making looms as Toyoda Industries - named after its founder Kiichiro Toyoda - before getting into cars in 1933.

When it started exporting cars, the company decided it needed a new logo and switched to the 'Toyota' name because it only took eight brush strokes to write in Japanese, as opposed to the ten Toyoda took to write.

So it was easier to write and eight is considered a lucky number, so it was a win all around there, really. Seems to have paid off too.

Audi 

Okay, so this one is pretty much named after the man who started it as well. He was just slightly more inventive.

August Horch started a car company called A. Horch & Cie. Motorwagen Werke (or Horch, as it became commonly known), but a falling out with his business partner saw him leave.

So he started again and saw no reason why he shouldn't use his name on his new company. His former business partner though otherwise, however, and he was prohibited from doing that.

So what did he do? He used the Latin translation of his name - Horch means 'Hark' or 'Listen', which is what Audi means in Latin.

Nissan

Nissan started life as DAT Motorcar in 1914, using another time-honoured lack of imagination of using its three founder's initials as its name.

In 1931 DAT introduced a small car it called the 'Datson' which eventually morphed into 'Datsun' and became the name of the company.

At the same time DAT/Datsun was bought by an industrial holding company called Nippon Sangyo (that loosely translates into 'Japan Industries'), which would eventually be shortened to 'Nissan' which, in 1981, would replace the Datsun name on all of the company's cars in order to 'strengthen global awareness of the Nissan brand'.

Mercedes-Benz

When Gottlieb Daimler began producing cars under the name Daimler-Moteren-Gesellschaft, one of his earliest customers was a wealthy Austrian businessman called Emil Jellinek who became a distributor of Damiler's horseless carriages and quickly developed a love of racing.

Jellinek named his Daimler racing car after his young daugther, Mercedes, which eventually became the name of the road going cars Jellinek sold for the company sold as well.

The Benz bit came when Daimler merged with Karl Benz's company in 1926 and registered 'Mercedes-Benz' as a brand name for their vehicles.

Mazda

These days 'Mazda' sounds Japanese to us simply because we are so used to hearing it as the name of a Japanese company, but Mazda say that the name actually comes from the ancient Zoroastrian God Ahura Mazda (still sounds Japanese…), the figurehead of a religion that has its roots in the prehistoric Indo-Iranian religious system from the early 2nd millennium BCE (thanks Wikipedia!).

Ahura Mazda was the supreme god of the Zoroastrianism and his last name translates into 'wisdom', which is a pretty big name to go with, really.

Although Mazda do also say that the name was also derived from… sigh…company's founder Jujiro Matsuda's last name…