Electric cars are upon us, but why are their model names so far out?

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SINGAPORE

Honda Civic. Toyota Corolla. Hyundai Avante. Mercedes Benz C 200. Audi A4. These are car model names that have stood tall for years, because they have an easily pronounceable ring to it, and are easily remembered by many people.

Then now comes the Honda e:Ny1 and Toyota bZ4X. The what? Car names have taken a dramatic downturn since mass-market EVs started appearing. Especially when you consider that the petrol and hybrid equivalents of the Toyota Bee-zed (or zee)-four-ex and Honda Ee-colon-en-why-one are the simply named, and easily remembered, Toyota RAV4 and Honda HR-V.

The business of naming new car models is a big and expensive branding exercise, and when they get it right the name has plenty of staying power. The Honda Civic, Porsche 911 and Toyota Corolla for example, all have been around for more than 40 years and even when the drivetrain changed, such as when the Corolla went from rear-wheel drive to front-wheel drive, and now into an SUV, the name remained.

Then why are we now getting all these try-hard, overly imaginative, or sometimes not very imaginative names like the Tesla Model 3, now?

It’s a new transition in naming convention, as dramatic as when the Ford Model T was phased out in 1927 and eventually, models with dramatic animal-inspired names like the Thunderbird and Mustang rolled in.

Except now the manufacturers are scrambling. They want to show how forward thinking they are by incorporating some element of zero-emissions into the car’s name. Toyota’s bZ, for example, means “beyond zero” emissions. The 4X means four-wheel drive and crossover SUV.

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/_7Ws4-oooN0

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Volkswagen’s EV range is prefaced by ‘ID’, but that doesn’t mean “identification”. Rather, the brand states that it means “Intelligent Design”.

It’s all as messy as when the Australian Vegemite came up with the laughable iSnack 2.0 name to promote its then-new variant product in 2017.

Meanwhile, Polestar, and to a certain extent Mercedes-Benz, have painted themselves into a corner with simplicity and complexity. Polestar’s EVs are number-based, with names like the Polestar 2, Polestar 3, and Polestar 4 based on their order of release. So is the naming convention going to run until Polestar 100? Or when a second-gen Polestar 2 arrives, is it going for Polestar 2.1? Or will the next-gen Polestar 2 arrive as a Polestar 8 sometime in the future and then have the marketers scramble to explain that it’s really a second-gen Polestar 2?

Mercedes-Benz has badged its electric cars as EQ models and the official line is that it’s a sub-brand, Mercedes-EQ, rather than Mercedes-Benz. It’s essentially the same naming convention as its Mercedes-AMG sports car division. But while the Mercedes-AMG C 63 reads fine, the  Mercedes-EQ EQA is simply tripping over a bunch of extra EQ EQ. By the time we get to the Mercedes-EQ AMG EQS 55, it’s all just alphabet soup. 

There are some bright spots however, such as with BMW’s succinctly named iX3, and the introduction of new, properly named cars like the Porsche Taycan and the upcoming Nissan Ariya.

Jaguar’s electric car naming system also appears to be not well thought through. The Jaguar E-Pace has to be an EV, right? 

Wrong.  

The E-Pace is a mild hybrid SUV. The EV is the Jaguar I-Pace, because ‘I’ for "Intelligent". Well you could argue that the real intelligent car is really the E-Pace in that it’s a mild hybrid that needs to balance its motive sources.

Car names stay around if you choose them right. Jumbles of numbers and letters don’t always work. Going back a couple of years, the Honda NSX and Subaru Impreza WRX had acronyms that sounded good when strung together. But the Honda e:Ny1, not at all.

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/fBEltYaJi2Q

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Marketing experts have noted that for product names to be easily remembered, it has to be easy to say, have the semblance of a noun, and evoke emotions that you want associated with the product. The Apple iPhone was a great example of thinking out of the box, both as a product and a marketing plan, at a time when other mobile phone makers were still stuck naming their phones the Nokia 3210 and 3310.

When you get it right, it sticks. Toyota did strike gold with the naming of its Prius hybrid. Remember that at its initial launch in 1997 it was a groundbreaking petrol-electric hybrid. Five generations later, the name has still held up.

Yet for every Prius and Corolla, we sometimes get a bZ4X.

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