Excellent article.....thanks for posting.

 

 

Of them all, the naming of the 420 really irked me, it was way too easy to be confused with the 420G (which should have been named either the MKXI, or the MKXB, or the MKX Series II) and the two cars were so different that only a "G" between them was nonsensical!

 

Ironic that the Europeans put more thought and imagination into naming the paint colors on their cars than goes into the car model designations. Sadly many of our domestic manufacturers have followed suit, particularly the premium brands. Cadillac ditched actual names and now I can't ever remember which is which. Lincoln started with the "Marks" decades ago and would by now have a string of roman numerals longer than most license plate numbers, so now the Mark is just followed by one or two random letters. Imperial didn't sound important enough so Chrysler decided to go back to their simplest and just call their top sedan a "300". Tesla for all its innovation used the least imagination, unable to come up with more than a single character. Infiniti tho has got to win the prize with the letters Q, G, I, J, or M followed by the displacement and now every car will be a Q followed by a number under 100 and divisible by 10 which means it won't be long before they've exhausted models and have to come up with a whole new scheme (so much for brand identity).

As a collector and restorer of classic cars I worry about the future of the hobby. Everyone knows the great historical car names like Impala, Riviera, Fairlane, Firebird, Thunderbird, Maverick, Comet, Wildcat, Torino.... Even Pacer and Gremlin are almost universally remembered. The Japanese did pretty darned good with names like Celica, Supra & Starion. Alpha-numeric designations just don't conjure up evocative images of adventure that make young people want to buy one. And that's largely what has driven the hobby is older adults buying the cars that they couldn't afford when they were young. They're not going to collect what they don't remember. Right now I can tell anyone I have a Corvette and they will know instantly what I'm talking about but if I told somebody I have a Cadillac XLR, they'd have an image in their head of a mid-sized SUV. If Cadillac had given it an actual "name" then even if somebody hadn't ever heard that Cadillac had its own version of the Corvette, they'd at least realize I was talking about something unfamiliar and ask me to describe it. Obviously even us Jaguar enthusiasts have a hard time with the plethora of designations so imagine what it means to a person who doesn't own one. Yes, with thousands of possible combinations across hundreds of manufacturers, all these one to three-character models I'm afraid are ultimately doomed to be forgotten, awash in a sea of dislexic monikers.

 

I found that rather amusing myself....overall, I guess if you can't hold your water, you better at least hit your Mk and if you can't do that, your better have a suspension to carry that water. But then again, if you use enough Experimental Jaguar names, you'll find yourself down at the pub drowning out these insidious methods for naming these cars. Though from the theme of this, that may be the place these all originated?