The best, worst and weirdest car names

By Dan Lienert

updated 1:34 p.m. ET Jan. 5, 2007

Go to a McDonald's in Paris and you will notice several cheeseburgers in the "Royal" line: the Royal Deluxe, Royal Cheese and Royal Bacon ("royal" means the same thing in French and English).

McDonald's France says on its Web site that the Royal Cheese wears a sesame-seed bun for a crown. "It looks, in fact, like a king," the site states.

Folks, it's just a cheeseburger.

The auto industry, like McDonald's France, tries to mask lowbrow items with highbrow names. Did any of Chrysler's customers believe that driving a Dodge Diplomat would make them more ambassadorial? Did any General Motors buyers think a Pontiac Parisienne would make them French?

But if we can criticize American automakers for putting hundred-dollar names on ten-dollar cars, so to speak, we must also applaud Japanese automakers, who tend to endow their Japan-only cars with such delightfully puzzling names as Honda Motor's Life Dunk.

But Americans dominate the lists of the best and worst car names, mostly because we can't fault certain European names for getting lost in translation. In gathering our ideas on the best, worst and weirdest car names, we thought it unfair to include European names that are difficult to read or pronounce (e.g., the FSO Warszawa) and others that have a common meaning in Europe that is obscure in the U.S., such as the Invicta Black Prince Wentworth. (At least we hope it makes more sense over there.)

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Ideally, the best car names are the ones that have been around for a while and have been able to withstand the test of time. No, the Lamborghini Diablo is no longer in production, but we have included it because it sounds vicious and sexy. It gets your blood going, and it suits the car.

Alphanumeric names are not particularly memorable, meaning that with a piece of this nature, you can skip over everything in the current rosters of Acura, BMW, Jaguar, Volvo, Saleen, Hummer, Infiniti, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz. Notice a pattern there? The brands that give their cars numbers and letters for names tend to be upscale. (Some upscale manufacturers don't use alphanumeric names. Rolls-Royce and Bentley are famous for bestowing their cars with such poetic names as Silver Ghost and Azure.)

A name doesn't have to be edgy or dangerous-sounding to be great, however. Some of the best names, such as Ford Motor's Explorer, are utilitarian. At the time of its introduction, the Explorer was a radical new thing — and its functional name implied that you could take the vehicle off-road, a message that Ford wanted to communicate. The Dodge Ram is another practical name given that it is a work truck. Calling it the "Horse" might not have been optimal, but giving it an animal name that doubles as a violent verb was a good move (the Ram is also Dodge's logo). Similarly, the name Land Rover — and to a lesser extent, its larger, more expensive cousin, Range Rover — aptly conveys that vehicle's ability to go wherever it likes and handle virtually any terrain.

The car names we like best — where the names not only suit the cars' natures but also sound, for lack of a better word, "cool" — include such automotive legends as the AC Shelby Cobra, Chevrolet Corvette, DeSoto Firedome, Dodge Viper, Lamborghini Diablo, Plymouth Barracuda and Rolls-Royce Phantom.

There are other great names out there, but you get the idea. The best use for the list above is as a point of comparison against the bad names you are about to endure. The worst car names tend to fall into two categories. The first concerns made-up names such as the Oldsmobile Alero and Chevrolet Lumina. They sound like Latin, but they're not really words as far as we know. In fact, we may get letters telling us that a "Lumina" is a real thing, though we doubt it. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has no record of such a word. The closest is the Latin word "lumen," which means "light." But what does light have to do with this Chevy sedan? Not much.

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