OK, boomer? Gen-X-ers, elder millennials most likely to name their cars, says DVLA Britain’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has said one in six UK motorists name their car, with those aged 35 to 53 most likely to do so. The results have been disappointing, to say the least. It cited some of the more "unusual" names – which seem very, very tame to those on this news desk – as "Disco Dave", "Lady Patricia …
Our old knackered camper conversion - a 16 year old Citroen Relay with over 200,000 miles on the clock - was "Myvan the Terrible".
Our shiny new camper conversion (well, you've got to do something in lockdown) is based on a minibus, and so is called "Minnie the Moocher", 'cos, well, it's a minniebus, and we mooch about the country side in it!
Icon, 'cos I bet she knows a thing or too about being a hoochie-coocher!
Our Morris Minor is named by my wife (I've never named an inanimate lump of metal moving parts and never will) - it's called Mickey.
Largely because when we bought it (27 years ago) it had a large Mickey Mouse transfer on the boot. The transfer is long gone (having the boot restored and repainted will do that) but the name remains.
My Dad didn't, so I don't get it from there.
My elder brother did, no idea if he still does.
My wife named her cars before I met her too, The younger kid named his car as soon as we bought it, when we recently got one for the older of the kids she wasn't interested, but their brother named it anyway and that's stuck.
I once had a Lada, a bright fire-engine red, Lada. I called it Trotsky, the Italian Communist. Trotsky could barely trot. Trotsky had problems climbing hills. Trotsky had the worst steering, gearbox, and brakes that I’ve ever seen, and I was convinced that it had to be the Russians’ fault, if Fiat had tried to sell anything like that in Italy there would have been a howling mob burning down Fiat HQ in Turin. I said, loudly and often, that if this was an example of Soviet engineering prowess, the Soviet Union was doomed. As it happens, shortly after I got rid of Trotsky and replaced him with a Suzuki Samurai, an example of Japanese engineering which had numerous problems and which I called Ten-Go, the Soviet Union imploded. (Students of history may recognize the name ‘Ten-Go’… think Okinawa 1945) Ten-Go was replaced by a much better behaved Honda Accord, a.k.a. Kaiju. My current ride is a Toyota, Silver Shadow. (Honda parts were hideously expensive…)
It worked great, until you tried to brake, and you had to do it Flintstones style by ramming your feet through the floor.
Confession - when I bought my first car in 1973, a 1965 Alfa Romeo SV, I named it Rebel and it was great until it rebelled and spun into a telephone pole. I blame it on the telco.
...before anyone heard of "Breaking Bad"...
...I named my '68 Plymouth Whatever model...
...because of the shade of its paint (and, yes, inspired by the late, great George Harrison, by way of his protégés, Badfinger)...
..."Baby Blue"...
...color me, Baby Boomer
(a real classic-- '55 model)
I'm not really one for naming my cars, but I have named a few. One old Talbot (I forget the model) was called Baldrick, because it was dirty and unreliable. I had a blue Ford Fiesta that I called "Sonic" after a cow orker said he saw me me go past him at high speed.
That's about it. My current car has no name.
I have been know to apply a number of names to my vehicles, most of which would make a drill sergeant blush, because the only time an inanimate object gets a name is when it is not complying with my intentions.
I give (pleasant) names to children horses, cats and dogs, never name anything I am likely to eat (chickens, cows, goats etc) although I have considered having a halibut named Eric.
I bought a knackered old Van den Plas Pricess for £20 when I was at Uni. I wanted something better than my Mum's old Ford 100E Van to use when courting, the van just didn't cut the mustard as a passion wagon. Later, when we were engaged, the VdP failed its MOT and had to be scrapped (the chassis had gone), so we looked around and found a 5 year old Vauxhall. My Fiancee said "I like our Registration Number, do you think we could get it transferred onto the Vauxhall?" The salesman said that he would gladly do it, it only cost £5 in 1975, so I dropped the paperwork off on my way to work on Monday, and we went back to collect the Vauxhall on Saturday. The salesman had a rather sour look on his face and said "I shot myself in the foot there, didn't I?" When I asked why, he said "That number is worth more than the car". I have since transferred the number, 345ARC, from car to car, and it is now on its ninth iteration, my 1994 LSE Soft Dash (mentioned elsewhere in this forum) and it has been valued at £6000. The transfer cost has risen inexorably from £5 in 1975 to £88 the last time I transferred it (2016).
My sister had a sports car (Triumph TR something, I think), which she did call Max. It was very second (more likely third or fourth) hand and did break a half-shaft one evening on the way to the theatre (seeing 'Big in Brazil', by Bamber Gascoigne, with Prunella Scales and Timothy West - very good).
Had a Mercury Sable station wagon (estate). My sister told me that teenagers like her son wouldn't get caught dead driving one (irony is that they had a minivan). So I named it the "chick magnet".
Bought a red Miata. Wife named it the "Little Red Car".
Bought a red Golf Alltrack. So I named it "Big Red".
Yes. I’ve named most of my cars - the ones I liked anyway.
My first I didn’t name - although if I had it would probably have been called chitbox (or something similar)
My second, which was destroyed when a Disco drove into it, would have been called scrap even before it actually was.
My third was ugly as hell, but supremely comfortable and dependable. She was a Volvo 360 and I eventually called her Bea. She died in a collision with an artic, and although repairable the insurance company decided she wasn’t worth it.
My fourth was a ‘67 Beetle, actually my wife’s, and we called her Buttercup - after the heroine in the Princess Bride.
My fifth was a tuned up P1800S, called Pandora. Beautiful and difficult, one of the greatest cars ever made.
My sixth was a Volvo V70, called Victor - although Bea 2 might have been an appropriate name. An estate car beyond reproach.
My seventh was a Volvo XC40. As yet unnamed - still too new - will it live up to the high standards set by its illustrious forebears, some of which I still have?
I don’t like getting new cars, so I tend to hang on to them. Vic has been in the family for thirteen years now, and shows no signs of that changing any time soon.
(In the interests of survey completeness, I’m an early model Gen X.)
...with a state-issued vanity plate to match. Speaking of match, I met my wife (at the time also a Yugo owner) via ol' Slavia as she thought that was the cleverest vanity plate ever.
While her car was soon traded in for a VW Golf, Slavia was eventually driven into the ground years later with the only major repair being a carburetor replacement while still under warranty, although he did suffer a major incident when a neighborhood thug ripped out the duct tape-attached cassette deck taking the entire heating system box with it.
Luckily the adjustment cables remained so I could still regulate heat/defrost although there was a learning curve to understand which cable did what...
I used to have a Ford Escort that was named Haiku.
It was the early 2000s and the start of coffee culture in the UK, and i was prone to a bit of a rant about coffee flavoured coffee (like Denis Leary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_dxLiuXuw ) so from that sketch I somehow morphed from not dying in front of some haiku writing motherfucker to being a haiku driving motherfucker. My flatmates chose to let the name die with the car when it was replaced due to extreme old age.
Was named by my kids. They simply called it "the thing"...
This name might have had something to do with the colour of bronzed copper and whilst being a current gen X trail (pre-face-lift), it came with huge wheels, door runners and extra trim giving it a presence not normally seen on the engorged Qashqai.
My previous car was an estate corolla usually referred to as "surprising" because the VVTi was knackered on the low revs (it managed 126k before being scrapped due to the handbrake hubs rusting through allowing the car to roll into a wall) but when it kicked into the higher cam at 2,750rpm on the nose it went like a bottle rocket. Might have been down to having the same 1.6 ltr petrol as the top of the range corolla SR...
The wife's car we've not bothered with naming... It's a bit hard when it's a micra and thus 10 a penny round these parts.
My current ride, a 12-year old Prius, is "Beatrice". I asked, and that's what she said.
Before that - a while back actually - an old Volvo was the "Blue Lemon" - so many things wrong. (Mostly design errors.)
My wife named her current car, a 2002 Camry, "Jade" - because of the color.
We like to pretend that the license plate letters are acronyms for something - we play that game whenever we drive. In the mean time, at home, there's "Happy Orange Violin" and "Wild Jungle Tiger".
We name a lot of things. For a while she was dealing with broken hips and Parkinson's: the wheelchair was "Charlie". As the hips healed, the outdoor walker (zipper?) was "Walter", and the two indoor walkers are "Willie" and "Wanda". We still have those - the Parkinson's didn't go away though the hips healed.
Decades ago when I played in traffic (was a corner worker at SCCA race weekends in Summit Point, WV) there was another worker who drove a car with vanity plate "Beyond". The car was a Plymouth Horizon, color blue.
Back in the day I drove a red Hillman Imp (badged as a Sunbeam in West Pondia). My SO and I called it Nosmirc, after the name given to his little red wagon by the narrator and chief protagonist in the novel "The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread" by Don Robertson, which I highly recommend. Said narrator liked to spell things backward, and the wagon bore the name "Crimson Streak". Hence "Nosmirc". Would have made a great vanity plate, but I was too cheap^wfrugal to pay for one.
Most of mine have been referred to generically -- the Buick, the van, etc. In the case of duplicate or similar models, the '96, the '97, etc.
Almost forgot the MGB roadster parts car, which had such bad rot in the (structural) rocker panels that you had to lift up on it in order to close the doors; we called it The Wreck of the Hesperus.
Then there was the MGB roadster parts car that had been crashed in the front. The back half was perfectly fine, so we sawed it in half for a friend to make into a trailer to tow behind his MGBGT. Obviously we called the trailer Eric, because it was only 'alf a B.
The Library - a 1991 Jaguar XJ6 4 litre inline 6, a Fine Gentleman's Conveyance.
Sparky - my current electrician's van (Transit Custom)
Starship Sponge - from 'back in the day' 2nd summer of love 1988, a blue Ford Cortina
Delilah - the camper van (Sprinter chassis), because, why why why???
My parents had a 1934 Austin Seven Ruby, which the whole family used to cram into (Mum, Dad, Grandpa, my elder brother, my sister, me, and the dog) for the two day trip from Southend (Essex) to the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales every summer. Three weeks later, another two day expedition to get back home. The car was called Honk, after a reading book I loved, called "Honk Runs Away", and because it had a Klaxon horn under the bonnet, so it said "Aah OOH Gah!" when you pressed the horn button. Some years later, Dad gave Honk to my bro when he got his licence, and bought a Rover. The horn on this car was a pair of Windtone units, which gave the car the name Barp. My mother was very disappointed when Dad said he had bought a Rover, she expected it to be a P5 model, but it was pre war 1936 Rover 10 P2 model, still the old Edwardian style. I don't remember any other of our cars being named, until now, when my 1994 Range Rover Classic LSE Soft Dash is referred to as "The Old Bus", and my little SEAT Ibiza was christened "Dumbo" on account of it being a two door, and it looks like it has enormous ears if you open the doors fully. (My Sister in Law named it, not me!). As far as being a Millenial, Generation X, etc, I was born just after the War, so I am a member of "The Bulge" generation.
Among American Boomers, it was mostly women who named their cars, and I can remember only two who did. An acquaintance in college called her Fiat "Tazio" after the driver Tazio Nuvolari. A friend of about 25 years ago named a VW of some sort, but I can't remember the name--a woman's name, not a man's.
The first car I named was a Citroen BX, one of the early models with no stalks around the steering wheel, a revovlving drum speedo and an LED Tacho - The Big Red Rocket Ship, it also had the Weber carb so as a 1600 it could nail the speedo to the 120 mph max.
The second was a Black Montego. When the wings had to be replaced and the Scrappies only had white ones it became Ska.
The third was a Race edition 2.1L diesel Espace I named the Flying Wardrobe on Wheels. Used to enjoy leaving the local boy racers standing at the lights with that one.
The last one I named (just scrapped it) was a green Chevvy Matiz, called the Pea, because it was small, green and felt about the size of a peapod.
In the 90s, when Williams were winning everything in F1 with Renault engines, they had at an Espace and made it into a real rocket ship. They wanged in a slightly detuned F1 engine, so it would last more than 5 minutes, and messed around with it for PR purposes. I believe it did 160mph.
In the end it got turned into a track ambulance. I'm hoping they never did top speed with a patient in the back though.
I'm a Boomer - born 1959 - and have never named my cars. I'm also not an old blues guy, so I've never named my guitars, either.
I don't name inanimate objects but it doesn't mean they aren't looked after. I need a reliable vehicle and, for a number of years, guitars were my stock in trade, so it makes sense to care for 'em. Besides which, only an idiot neglects useful gear.
B.B. King said that early in his career, a fight started in a bar where he was playing, two men fighting over a woman named Lucille. In the course of the fight a fire started. King left, but when back in to rescue his guitar. He said that he named his guitar Lucille to remind himself never to do something that stupid again.
"and the computer is Amy."
Are you, perchance, of a certain age and owned an Amiga computer in your youth?
We've always had weird names for our cars:
Captain Peacock (blue) / Bingo Snozzberry (red) / Chuffer Sandwich (it's too long a story) / Derek Zoolander (the face - it *was* Blue Steel, with the pout)
I could go on, but it'd be like asking a Mad Cat Lady about her 100 cats names...
Dark blue cargo van was Babe the Big Blue Ox, two-door sedan was Minnie (sorry, no idea why since she wasn't THAT small), early 1970's V8 four-door beastie was Hildegarde which the dictionary said derived from the old Teutonic for Battle Maiden. A former co-worker had a small two-door named Buck on account of the bad clutch.
We geezers name cars here in the US, too. My current 2007 Mercedes SLK 350, a car I will drive to my grave, is named Veronica in honor of convertible-loving spunky TV detective Veronica Mars. She replaced my 2003 jet-black inside-and-out Mitsu Eclipse Spyder named Elizabeth in honor of Elizabeth Jennings, super spy from The Americans. Before that was Patricia, a silver 1998 Eclipse Spyder. Before THOSE girls were three GM convertibles not classy enough for their own names, tho I did occasionally refer to my first convertible as Whistler because her turbo was a little off. My very first car in the mid 70s was Stable - she was full of stalls. I've owned six convertibles in the last 30 years, a boyhood dream after watching the incomparable Diana Rigg drive around in her Lotus covertible as the ultimate Avenger, Emma Peel.
At this house:
The 1941 Plymouth (just visiting) is Gus (an obscure US reference)
The 1979 Chevy Nova (eventually deceased) was named Christine (not the same car as the movie, just haunted)
The 1996 minivan is Tsimbl (you can look that up)
The 1991 Mazda MX5 Miata is tagged FNORD (feeling uneasy and confused?) but his field-name is Smurph (he's just that shade of blue)
The 2002 Accord is nameless, but I'm the friendly stranger in the black sedan.
We had a Toyota Corolla Wagon that we bought when my oldest was a year old. When she got her license, she called it "The Blueberry", because of its blue color. I don't know if she still names cars. We generally refer to our cars by their color, anyway. The red car; the green car. So far, we've never had two cars of the same color at the same time.
I had a RAV4 I got rid of at its 19th birthday I called “Tank”. Over the years bits kept falling off, but it just kept going. At its retirement the Windows were propped up inside the door frame with wooden blocks, it had no 5th gear and I had a pile of rusty bits no-one could identify that were found underneath it one day. I ended up getting rid of it because it had failed it’s MOT for the first time, but any repair was more than it was worth, and it wasn’t my main vehicle anyway. I stuck it on eBay for spares and got £600 from a guy in France, who drove over, stuck it on the back of his trailer, and drove back to France with it. Turns out that in France the RAV4s are highly sought after over there for off road and farm use, and he has a business restoring them and keeping them going.
As for its replacement. In 2015 I bought an orange Jeep Renegade I call “Tango’d”
Only one car I've owned ever had a name, a 1991, Midnight Blue, Ford Scorpio Estate. It was named "The Hearse" by my work colleagues.
Mosty of mine were named from their reg plates or models, with a couple of exceptions...
Helen (reg on a 405), The Pig (Cavalier SRI - plenty of grunt but no refinement), Vicky (Vectra), Saffy (Zafira), Callie (reg on 2nd Zafira), Aggi (Agila), Steph (reg on mum's Meriva), Debby (Doblo) and my current one Giji based on the reg on my new Doblo, not to mention Dee (Deloris the Delectably Delightfull Deluxe) - Lambretta J50 Deluxe.
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