53 of the coolest ever car names

You probably couldn't live much of a nomadic lifestyle in Ariel's hilarious dune-buggy-stroke-sports-car mashup, what with the entire lack of luggage space and sleeping quarters and whatnot, but it's an entirely apt name for a car perfectly at home traversing some wild, untouched wilderness. Even if we can't imagine most of them see much in the way of wilderness beyond Oxfordshire.

We could fill up a good chunk of this list with Aston Martins, but we want to at least try and be fair to other manufacturers. We definitely can't skip over the company's new mid-engined hybrid supercar, though: it's a gutsy move to name your car after the utopian paradise in Norse mythology where slain warriors go to blissfully live out their afterlives, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Aston.

Oh, and the figures who guide souls to Valhalla? Valkyries.

The Aston Martin Vulcan is a big, scary, loud, powerful and unbelievably cool-looking car, so it's appropriate for it to be named after a big, scary, loud, powerful and unbelievably cool-looking aeroplane. In a pleasing passing of the baton, the Aston Vulcan was launched in 2015, the same year the final airworthy Avro Vulcan touched down for the last time, with the two astonishing, howling machines briefly united for a photoshoot that year.

A big, powerful and unashamedly extravagant coupe like the Bentley Brooklands demands an evocative name. The first ever purpose-built motor racing circuit, and a place where Bentley racked up some of its early racing successes, does the trick nicely. Brooklands, after all, was a place where the era's wealthy thrillseekers went to duke it out, and the Bentley Brooklands is just the sort of car their descendants would drive.

'La Voiture Noire' translates simply to 'The Black Car', which is already a cool if highly literal name. But the name of this £10 million-ish Chiron-based one-off goes deeper than that – it's a nod to the original 'La Voiture Noire', one of the four Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantics ever built and the personal car of Ettore Bugatti's son, Jean. The car vanished when its then-owner was fleeing the German invasion of France in 1940, and has never been located, so the modern 'La Voiture Noire' pays homage to one of the car world's great mysteries.

'Roadmaster' evokes a feeling of power, of lauding it over all the other mere mortals you share the tarmac with, and we're sure that was something drivers of the original run of big, elegant Roadmasters, made between the '30s and '50s, could relate to. The name's return in the '90s as a floppy, leatherette-stuffed Florida retiree's saloon as well as a gigantic, fake wood-clad station wagon? Maybe not so much, but we're still quite drawn to that estate.

Naming a car after a mythical city of gold means the car itself needs to be something pretty special, and initially at least, the Cadillac Eldorado was. The famous 1959 version represents Peak Tailfin in the era where American car design was at the height of its jet age excess. It's a beautiful car, which is more than can be said of the front-wheel drive lump the Eldorado had become by the end of its life in 2002, but hey – at least it still had that name.

Cars named after military vehicles are nothing unusual, but it's usually planes. Chevrolet looked somewhere altogether damper for its new two-seater convertible sports car in 1953, opting for Corvette after a type of fast, agile warship. Well, fast and agile by the standards of ships, anyway. It's a cool name, if you can ignore the fact that it most likely originally derives from the Dutch word for 'basket'.

We'll admit, to British ears, the word 'Blazer' probably conjures up the ill-fitting jacket you were reluctantly made to wear to school, even at the height of summer. Stick it on a boxy '70s Chevy 4x4 though, and you'll suddenly picture yourself battering down a dirt track in California, dust billowing behind you as the small-block under the bonnet makes all of the good V8 noises. Just us? Fair enough.

Concorde is, without a question, the coolest aircraft of all time – stunningly pretty and an astonishing technological achievement that still sounds like it's from the future even 57 years after it first flew and 23 since it retired. The Chrysler Concorde is neither stunningly pretty nor an astonishing technological achievement – it's a mediocre saloon car from a fairly bleak era for the American car industry, and that name is pretty much the only worthwhile thing about it.

The Dacia Bigster is basically a big Duster, so its name is fairly apt for a company known for its fun but no-nonsense approach to cars. Big plus Duster equals Bigster. We like that, especially because 'Bigster' is a lot more fun to say than 'Sportage', 'RAV4' or 'CR-V'. It sounds like some sort of '70s slang term – we're not sure what for, but we can imagine it being said by someone with long, straggly hair and billowy bell-bottom jeans.

Proof of the power of the Italian language, the incredibly cool-sounding word 'mangusta' actually translates to 'mongoose'. Why name a thumping V8 sports car after a small, ferrety mammal? Well, the story goes that a planned deal between company founder Alejandro de Tomaso and Carroll Shelby had fallen through. De Tomaso was unhappy about this, and so named his new car after one of the few animals capable of killing cobras. Get it?

Any of the gazillion different versions of the modern Dodge Challenger could qualify for a spot on this list (with the possible exception of the Scat Pack which… ewwww), but as cool car names go, we can't argue with the first of the ludicrously overpowered supercharged versions, the Challenger Hellcat. Evoking a demonic, fire-breathing feline is cool enough, then you learn it's actually named after a stumpy but powerful WWII fighter plane. Yes.

Dodge has a fine history of excellent car names (although on the flipside, it's also the company that once sold a car called the Caravan), but for sheer cool factor, we can't ignore the high-performance version of the late '60s coronet, the Super Bee. It's possible this name was actually some superb punning – the Super Bee is based on Chrysler's B-body platform – but it also spawned one of the coolest logos in automotive history, a furious, crash-helmeted, Hemi-powered bumble bee.

The Talon was the only car from short-lived '90s Chrysler sub-brand Eagle to be named after part of an actual eagle, and it's certainly a better bet for a car name than Beak or Cloaca. Frankly, as a rebadged Mitsubishi Eclipse with the option of all-wheel drive and turbo power and the only vaguely interesting car to come from the brand, it was the only model from Eagle's brief existence worthy of such a name.

Going down an extremely literal, on-the-nose route for your car's name isn't always advisable. If every car company did that, we'd have ended up with such delights as the Vauxhall Dull, the BMW Hideous and the Mitsubishi Why Would Anybody Buy This? For a car that hits 62mph in 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 211mph, though, we think the Ferrari 812 Superfast can get away with it. It's also a name from Ferrari's history, although the original 500 Superfast could probably only get away with being called the Reasonablyfast by today's standards.
 

It takes incredible chutzpah to give your car a name that's literally just the company name again with 'The' stuck in front of it. Again, it's probably not something, say, Vauxhall could have gotten away with, but once again, Ferrari can somehow get away with it. The LaFerrari's name, though, did set a bit of a precedent for every Ferrari that's come since, and we're not entirely sure any of them have quite lived up to it.

Things that the Ford Mustang shares its name with include a species of feral horse, a gorgeous Second World War fighter plane and a Fender electric guitar. Basically, this isn't a name that's applied to uncool objects. Was it fairly audacious of Ford to then name a high-performance version after the literal speed of sound? Absolutely, especially because the Ford Mustang Mach 1 categorically cannot travel at 767mph. It somehow pulls it off, though.

For British people, the name 'Thunderbird' is more likely to conjure up images of fantastical jet age rescue vehicles piloted by freakish dead-eyed, slack-jawed puppets than a big personal luxury car, but for a certain generation, that might make the name of the Ford Thunderbird even cooler than it already is. These two paths met in appalling fashion when the garish 11th-gen Thunderbird appeared in the unwatchable 2004 live action Thunderbirds remake. Funnily enough, that was pretty much the last we heard of either franchise. Still a cool name, though.

It makes us terribly, terribly sad that Australia's domestic car industry is extinct, because it's deprived the world of any more ludicrous, tyre-smoking, V8-powered pickup trucks. The most famous of these, of course, was the HSV Maloo, its name coming from the word for 'thunder' in one of the many Aboriginal languages of Australia. Not even the brief and fever-dreamish period where it was sold in Britain with Vauxhall badges could dent that coolness.

If you're going to make up a word for your car's name, you'd better be sure you get it right, lest you end up with something like 'Tiguan' (a portmanteau of the German words for 'tiger' and 'iguana'. Seriously). Hyundai pulled it off, though. We have no idea what 'Veloster' means – 'velocity master', perhaps? – but it's a word that rolls off the tongue rather satisfyingly, plus, as the Dacia Bigster has already taught us, any car name that ends in 'ster' is usually good.

A prime example of a car that spectacularly under-delivers on the promise of its name. Buy a Jeep Renegade and you probably picture yourself as a wild west outlaw, a lone rider going from town to town, a folk hero sticking it to The Man. The reality is that you're thumping about in a half-baked, dated, Wrangler wannabe based on a grab bag of ancient Fiat bits, and the only renegade activity you'll be doing is sometimes accidentally going 32 in a 30 zone. Sorry to shatter your dreams, partner.

We don't need to explain this one, do we? It's literally called the Jensen Interceptor. Has there ever been a more appropriate car/name combo? This big, beefy, Chrysler V8-powered grand tourer literally couldn't have been called anything other than 'Jensen Interceptor'. Best of all? The name's coming back on a spiritual successor later in 2026 – and it'll still have a V8! Glory be.

We can't pretend Kia has a particularly stellar history of car names. Prior to the Stinger, the company's only badge of real note was Cee'd, and that was only because of that inexplicable apostrophe. The Stinger wasn't like any other Kia, though, so it deserved a name that wasn't like any other Kia. 'Stinger' is pretty route one for a sporty car, but hey, it works, and we're a little surprised nobody else got there first.

Lamborghini is another brand that could have a frankly unfair proportion of this list devoted to it, but we'll start with one of its few models to deviate from its tradition of naming cars after Spanish fighting bulls. 'Countach' is a dialect term from the Piedmont region – essentially that area's equivalent of 'crikey!' – and a favourite word of a member of the car's engineering team. It was jokingly suggested as the name by designer Marcello Gandini, but as history shows, the joke stuck. Countach, indeed.

This Lambo's name does come from a fighting bull, specifically one who was spared after surviving a particularly brutal sparring match in 1879 that saw him withstand 24 jabs of a sword from one of the era's foremost bullfighters. But what could this exotic-sounding, multisyllabic word possibly translate to in English? That's right – 'bat'. Obviously. Now you know why Bruce Wayne drove one in The Dark Knight.

Another bovine Lambo, Sant'Agata's new 907bhp, plug-in hybrid, quote-unquote baby supercar takes its name from a big angry boy cow who was fighting in the mid 1870s, just a few years before Murcielago. The Spanish word 'Temerario' roughly equates to 'fierce' or 'courageous', but a more literal translation is 'reckless'. Gutsy thing to name a car, really, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Lambo.

The Land Rover Defender name isn't as old as you might think – it's only been around since 1989, when Land Rover also started building the Discovery and so needed another name to distinguish the models that had previously been just the 90 and 110. We'd say the company did a pretty fantastic job of coming up with a new name that neatly summed up the car's all-conquering capabilities.

Across its three generations, the Exige was the most hardcore, track-focused roadgoing model in the Lotus range, so it needed a name that summed this up without deviating from the company's traditional E-obsessed naming scheme. Cue 'exiger', the French word for 'demanding' – certainly apt if you were to try and use the Exige as a day-to-day car, but also simply a very cool-sounding word.

Both Maserati and Volkswagen are fond of naming their cars after specific winds – that's how they both came to sell cars called the Bora – but it somehow always seems cooler when Maserati does it, probably because any Maserati carries an air of inherent coolness about it. Perhaps the coolest of all was the Shamal, a rare and gloriously boxy '90s GT named after a sandstorm-creating wind that blows through the Middle East a few times a year.

Further evidence that you can name a car just about anything in Italian and still have it sound good, the Quattroporte's name famously just means 'Maserati Four-Doors'. Because, y'know, it's a four-door Maserati. If companies from other countries had tried this, we could have ended up with the Volkswagen Viertüren, Volvo Fyradörrar or, erm, Vauxhall Four-Doors. With the greatest of respect to those languages, we don't think they'd have had quite the same effect.

Usually, generic alphanumeric names do precisely nothing for us, but we can make an exception for the McLaren F1. After all, McLaren was mostly known as a Formula 1 team before its paradigm-shifting hypercar, and with its central driving position, screaming V12 and power and performance figures that embarrassed pretty much anything else on the market, what else was it supposed to be called?

Officially, Mitsubishi has never confirmed what the 'FQ' stands for in the various physics-scrambling UK-only models of the Lancer Evolution VIII, IX and X. Unofficially, though, it's pretty widely known that this was Mitsubishi's UK division having a bit of fun. If you're not already aware, the Q stands for 'quick', and the F? Well, you can work that one out for yourself. To be fair, it was nothing if not accurate.

Another case of 'cool name, boring car', a pulsar is the electrically-charged, collapsed remains of a gigantic star. We're talking about the sort of massive astronomical concepts that serve as useful reminders for how small and insignificant our lives are in the grand scheme of things here, so quite why Nissan thought it was a suitable name for a crushingly bland hatchback is beyond us. Then again, driving a Pulsar is also a good way of reminding yourself how small and insignificant your life is.

Often cited as the genesis of what would become the muscle car, 1949's Oldsmobile Rocket 88 hailed from a time when the American car industry was barrelling into the future and enraptured by the nascent space race, and kicked off a whole line of cars from the now-deceased manufacturer with equally cool names including Jetfire, Jetstar and Starfire (spotting a pattern?). It arguably cemented Oldsmobile as the king of cool car names until Dodge started putting up a fight in the 1960s.

Away from its fixation with space travel and aeronautics, Oldsmobile also took the opportunity in the 1960s to launch a massive estate car – sorry, station wagon – with skylights at the back that allowed rear passengers to gaze up at the scenery they were travelling through. The vistas they were cruising through, if you will. Indeed, that led to the name 'Vista Cruiser', a fantastically romantic and evocative name for what was fundamentally a practical family car (one that came with the option of a 7.5-litre, 365bhp V8, mind you).

The concept of utopia is fairly indefinable, and likely varies a lot from person to person. Certainly, it's not an idea that it's easy to imagine actually existing in the real world. We'd have to imagine that barrelling along in an 852bhp, V12-powered Italian supercar with a gated seven-speed manual gearbox to play with comes pretty close, though, so Utopia is as good a name as any for Pagani's third ever model.

As for Pagani's first model, it was yet another car to be named after wind (no, not that kind – stop giggling at the back). This time, it's a kind of dry, warm wind that occurs in the Andes, specifically in Argentina, where company founder Horacio Pagani originally hails from. Let's not beat about the bush, though – Zonda could have been a totally made-up word and it still would have looked right at home on the back of this spectacular car.

If you're going to name a car after a fish, you need to tread very carefully – after all, what sort of message would you be sending out if you rolled out a new model called the Trout? Or the Haddock? Or the Hammerjaw? Actually, that last one's quite good, ignore that. For its legendary pony car, though, Plymouth thankfully went for one of the cooler fish – the sleek, fast and predatory Barracuda.

Mythological creatures offer up a strong pool of names for carmakers hoping to add a dash of mystique and power to their models, and sure enough, the Pontiac Firebird, twin sibling to the Chevrolet Camaro, does just that. Its name is another term for the Phoenix, the creature from various global mythologies that burns itself to death before regenerating. Hopefully, your Firebird won't attempt to do the same thing.

Let's break this one down, shall we? Tempest: a wild, unpredictable storm. Good start. LeMans: French city and home to the world's most famous endurance race, and also a high-end trim package for the tempest. Even better. GTO: a term shamelessly borrowed from Ferrari, suggesting a link to motorsport, and the high-performance package for the Tempest LeMans that heralded the real beginning of the muscle car era in 1964. Pretty cool, we think you'll agree.

We're so used to the Carrera name from a bajillion different iterations of Porsche 911 that it's easy to forget that it's simply the Spanish word for 'race'. So when Porsche called its wild V10 hypercar the Carrera GT, it was essentially saying it was a race grand tourer – actually a pretty good name, considering the motorsport howl of that glorious engine and the purity of its manual box combined with an interior as beautifully appointed as the finest luxury cars of the era.

Does the name of Ram's ludicrous supercharged desert racer deliberately call out Ford's F-150 Raptor by evoking the biggest, baddest prehistoric killer lizard of them all? Officially, no – TRX was just a handy name that Dodge already had the rights to and sounded tough and off-roady. We can't help thinking the marketing team had a dinosaur showdown for the ages on the mind, though, and sorry Ford – in the name department, at least, t-rex beats raptor.

Spanish, like Italian, is one of those languages that just sounds good, so it tends to pop up a lot in car names. See most Lamborghinis, basically every Seat and Cupra (obvs), the various Carrera Porsches, and the Mitsubishi Pajero (although don't mention that one to a Spanish speaker). The Renault Fuego pulls it off, too – that's just the Spanish word for 'fire', but 'fuego' has so much more dynamism and excitement to it. Shame you can't say the same for the actual car.

Rolls-Royce loves a supernatural name for its cars, which tends to suit them for the almost spookily smooth, quiet way they go about their business. Our favourite is Wraith, used twice by Rolls – once in the '30s and again on its majestic two-door V12 coupe in the 2010s. In folklore terms, a wraith is utterly terrifying, a portent of death taking the form of a skeletal cloaked figure or a patch of darkness with glowing eyes. Ignore that, though, and just focus on the satisfying way 'Rolls-Royce Wraith' rolls off the tongue. Mmmm.

When Texan horsepower merchant Carroll Shelby first popped a huge Ford V8 into the petite British AC Ace roadster, it became apparent the car would need a new name, and as with so many other great cars, he turned to the animal kingdom for inspiration – specifically, to a particularly big, vicious snake that would do you some serious damage if you got on the wrong side of its fangs. Appropriate for a car as unhinged as the Cobra, then.

We return to the Dacia Bigster School of Naming Cars, winding the clock back 20 years or so to the Skoda Roomster. For a car with an unerring focus on utility and practicality over literally anything else, Roomster almost feels like too jaunty of a name, but without it, this would be the most strait-laced vehicle ever made, so just let it have its fun – it's like that quiet person in the office letting loose after they've had their seventh drink at the Christmas party.

Fun fact: the first couple of generations of Outback were sold under the name Subaru Legacy Lancaster in the Japanese market. We've no idea why Subaru thought their local customers would prefer a car named after a medium-sized city in the northwest of England rather than the vast, untamed, searingly hot wilderness of Australia, but we're glad it received the much cooler name of Outback everywhere else. Even if you're far more likely to actually see one in Lancaster.

The little 4x4 we got in Britain as the Suzuki SJ-series was sold under a baffling array of different names around the world, but by far the coolest was its American-market name, Suzuki Samurai. We've got cool letters like 'Z' and 'K' (although that applies to any Suzuki), we've got pleasing alliteration, and we've got a name shared with cool sword-wielding Japanese warriors. What's not to like?

As well as being the sole car to receive Japan's only homegrown V12 engine, the Toyota Century is the transportation of choice for the country's high-flying businesspeople and politicians. It needs a name, then, that suits its distinguished purpose. How about one that literally means A HUNDRED YEARS? It actually got the name because it arrived in 1967, 100 years after the birth of Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries, but it certainly lends the Century an extra air of grace and importance.

Never has a name been more appropriate for a car. The TVR Cerbera's moniker comes from Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guarded the underworld in Greek mythology, and presumably wouldn't hesitate to bite the hand off anyone that tried to leave. You know what else wouldn't hesitate to bite your hand off? A car that barely weighs a tonne, sends up to 440bhp to the rear wheels, and thinks the only driver aid you need is a brake pedal. The TVR Cerbera, in other words.

We mean this in the nicest possible way, but British wildlife is rubbish. Other parts of the world are roamed by huge, impressive and sometimes vicious creatures, whereas the biggest thing you're likely to encounter while out for a stroll in the UK countryside is a stag. They are, admittedly, an utterly majestic sight, and as king of the British mammals, it's only right that it lent its name to one of the brawniest, meatiest British sports cars of all – the Triumph Stag.

Naming it after an Italian place is a great way of jazzing up the appeal of a fairly everyday car – see also the Ford Capri, Cortina and Torino, the Opel Monza and the Kia Sorento. 'Firenza', though – a slight butchering of Firenze, the Italian name for Florence – lends itself particularly nicely to car use. It's one of those words that just sounds sporty and exotic – perfect for one of the coolest Vauxhalls of all, especially in HP 'Droopsnoot' form.