Here are 57 of the funniest and most rubbish car names ever

You know this car in Britain as the Shogun, but most other markets received it as the Pajero, coming from the Latin name for the wild Pampas cat. Not in Spanish-speaking markets, though – there, 'pajero' roughly translates to a word you might yell at someone who's just cut you in traffic, accompanied by a specific hand gesture. Cue a hasty name change to Montero, meaning 'huntsman'.

Toyota’s Midship Runabout 2-seater ran into issues in France, because when you say its name in French, it comes out sounding something like ‘em air du’. Now say that quickly, and think back to your GCSE French days, amusing yourself by gleefully looking up swear words in an English to French dictionary, and you’ll understand why Toyota dropped the 2 and just called it the MR in France and Belgium (but weirdly, not in Canada).

Audi’s electric cars face a different issue in French-speaking markets, this time relating not to pronunciation but spelling. ‘e-tron’ may sound all cyber and futuristic, but in French, ‘étron’ means – and there’s no other way of saying this – turd. Audi, seemingly unaware of or unbothered by this, still happily markets its cars under this name in French-speaking regions, presumably leading to lots of childish giggling.

This one’s not rude (well, it could be, we suppose), just a bit weird. Why on earth would Fiat, an Italian company, decide to name a car after the Italian word for ‘hardening’? Then again, this is the company that’s also sold cars named the Uno (‘one’), Punto (‘point’), Tipo (‘type’) and Linea (‘line’), so maybe it’s just opening a dictionary on random pages. Coming soon: the Fiat Toothpaste.

Lamborghini’s preference for naming its cars after Spanish fighting bulls can lead to some very cool names, but also some translation weirdness. Urraco, for instance, means ‘magpie’, and Murcielago translates to ‘bat’. Reventon is particularly unfortunate in car terms – it means ‘burst’, but can also specifically refer to a flat tyre. Perhaps the best, though, is the Revuelto – while it can mean ‘unruly’, ‘revueltos’ are also what Spanish speakers call scrambled eggs. Tasty.

If we had a pound for every time a Japanese manufacturer sold a rebadged Suzuki kei car with a name that translated to something unfortunate in Spanish, we’d have £2, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it’s happened twice. Thankfully for Nissan, the Moco – a rebadged Suzuki MR Wagon –was also only ever sold in Japan, sparing Spanish-speaking markets the giggles of being offered a car named after what you fish out of your nose when you think nobody’s looking.

When this phenomenally average electric crossover was revealed in 2023, we assumed its name was supposed to be pronounced ‘anyone’. We were spared that particular bit of cringe – turns out you just say it ‘ee en why one’ – but the resulting jumble of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and punctuation isn’t much better. It’s like Honda’s naming department spent an entire meeting just gently mashing their foreheads into the keyboard until something semi-acceptable came out.

Honda must have been taking tips from Toyota, which seemingly employed a similar technique for naming its first mass-produced EV for Europe. The bZ4X is actually part of a wider bZ (‘beyond zero’) range in China, and the 4X refers to its relative size and the fact that it’s a crossover. This seems like extraneous information when it’s the only bZ model available in other countries, though, and indeed, in the US and Ireland it’s now known simply as the bZ. The rest of the world still has to navigate an alphanumeric salad, though.

The very Reasonably Priced Cee’d was Kia’s first model designed and built in Europe, and the name was supposed to reflect that. It comes from CEE, the French initials for the European Economic Community, and ED, standing for ‘European design’. Problem is, that leaves you with ‘Ceeed’, and that is quite simply too many Es. Kia’s solution? The Cee apostrophe d.

Cool car, the Ferrari FF. The world needs more shooting brakes, especially ones with V12s. Less cool is its name – it stands for ‘Ferrari Four’, in reference to its four seats and, in a Ferrari first, four-wheel drive. Quite apart from the fact that FF can also stand for ‘front-engined, front-wheel drive’, that means we’re left with a car called the Ferrari Ferrari Four. Catchy.

Capitalising on the ’70s uptick in demand for small, efficient cars, Renault decided it would start selling the original 5 in North America in 1976. With a limited market presence and consumer unfamiliarity with its European number-based naming scheme, though, Renault concluded that a new name was needed, one that emphasised its Frenchness. Its solution? LeCar. Yes, the Renault The Car.

Sure, nobody actually ever calls the Range Rover by its full, official title, especially now that RR is officially Its Own Thing under JLR’s ‘House of Brands’. Still, buy a brand new Rangie today and your V5C will still call it a Land Rover Range Rover, which is hardly an elegant solution, especially when you start tagging Evoque, Velar or Sport SV Ultimate Edition onto the end of it.

Yes, we know the original name for McLaren Automotive’s first road car has some historical basis – the MP4 prefix was long used for Macca’s Formula 1 machines – but when you’re trying to compete with cars with evocative names like Gallardo and 458 Italia, it’s simply not going to cut it. Things got a bit better when the MP4 bit was dropped after a year or so, but ‘12C’ still tricked more than a few people into thinking this V8-powered car in fact had a V12.

This exec saloon was the first car to get Alfa Romeo’s magnificent ‘Busso’ V6 engine, a powerplant the company was rightly very proud of. So proud, in fact, that it made it part of the car’s name. And sure, ‘Alfa Romeo 6’ would have been a fine if rather bland name, and would inevitably have been shortened to ‘Alfa 6’ by the masses anyway. But for reasons we can’t fathom, Alfa decided its full, official name should be the Alfa Romeo Alfa 6. No, us neither.

Mercedes’ now-abandoned EQ naming scheme for its first wave of ground-up EVs seemed simple enough – the last letter points to the corresponding combustion-powered Merc – but it posed a problem when it came to the equivalents of the GLE and GLS SUVs. EQE and EQS were already taken by pebble-shaped saloon cars, so Merc’s solution was to matter-of-factly shove ‘SUV’ onto the end of the official model names, turning the company’s already sprawling range into even more of a headache for customers.

Reinventing an iconic and widely-known car is always going to provide a couple of hurdles in the naming department. BMW got around it by making Mini its own brand, Fiat just shrugged and gave the new 500 the same name as the original, but Volkswagen’s awkward solution was to officially name the new Beetle… the New Beetle. This, funnily enough, didn’t stick with the buying public.

The precursor to the Nova (a car with a largely false urban myth about its own name), the Chevy II was developed in a remarkably short amount of time, but the meeting to decide its name must have been one of the quickest parts of all. “What should we call the new Chevy?” ‘“That’s it!” We can only be thankful GM didn’t later decide to give us the Cadillac Caddy. And since there was no Chevy I, we have no idea where the II came from.

You can just about get away with ‘brand name by brand name’ if you make, say, perfume, but last time we checked, Chrysler does not make perfume. It makes cars. The Chrysler by Chrysler, though, was a full-size luxury saloon from Chrysler’s Australian division. Was it supposed to sound classy and upmarket? Probably. Did it actually just sound confusing? Definitely.

Speaking of naming cars like perfumes, that’s literally what Posh Citroen is doing now. Starting with the rather likeable new No. 8 electro-fastback-saloon-crossover thing, all its model names will be preceded by No., a move it openly says is inspired by Chanel. Nice idea, but if it wasn’t hard enough explaining to people what a DS is when they ask you what you drive, it sure is now.

‘Huh huh, made in Yorkshire, was it?’ A tedious bore will ask you for the 934,000th time when they see that you drive a Volkswagen e-Up!, a goal left even more open by VW’s irritatingly jaunty insistence on sticking an exclamation mark on the end of the name. And it’s at that point that you might consider slamming your fingers in the e-Up!’s door, just to feel something. Anything.

Smart has always had some lightly irritating model names, what with the Fortwo and Forfour, but they took a whole new level in annoyingness when the brand became part of a Mercedes-Geely joint venture and started building bigger, posher EVs. Every time we remember that we’re actually supposed to pronounce the hashtag in its latest models’ names as ‘hashtag’, it chips away at our spirit just that little bit more.

Look, ‘probe’ has several meanings. It could just be a thorough investigation, or a type of uncrewed spacecraft. But let’s be real – there’s only one thing that comes to mind when somebody mentions a probe, and it’s probably happening to a part of your body you’d really rather it wasn’t.

We totally get wanting to give a car an imposing, powerful name, and US manufacturer Studebaker had a nice little niche with models like the Commander and President. But really? Dictator? That’s not a word that’s ever had positive connotations attached to it – especially not in the 1930s, when the Dictator was on sale. In a moment of sensibleness, Studebaker chose to call it the Director in non-US markets instead.

We could probably stick any of BYD’s sea life-themed cars on here, but at least seals, dolphins and sea lions are cute. Anyone that’s been remotely near the British seaside has a more complicated relationship with seagulls, which is why BYD decided to call this little electric hatch the Dolphin Surf for the European market instead. Still a strange name, but at least it doesn’t conjure up images of having your chips stolen or your T-shirt covered in something brown, white and unspeakable.

In all fairness to Dodge, the Swinger sport package for the Dart first appeared in 1968, a few years before the type of swinger you’re thinking of really hit the mainstream as a concept. It was definitely already a thing, though, and to be fair, this was the free-spirited late ’60s – it’s entirely possible Dodge knew exactly what it was doing. Anyway, here’s the joke you were waiting for about the Dart Swinger’s keys spending most of their time in a bowl.

We don’t know what was going on at Dodge in 1968, but that was also the year that the Scat Pack first appeared as a high-performance option for the Charger and Coronet. Supposedly, it comes from the old-timey use of ‘scat’, meaning ‘go away’ – a reference to the Scat Packs’ prodigious performance. Realistically though, scat is only ever going to have one of two meanings in a modern context, and if you’re thinking of the form of improvised jazz singing, then congratulations on being more mature than us.

We’ll stop making fun of Dodge soon, we promise. And yes, we know the word ‘caravan’ has its roots in the epic journeys once taken along the Silk Road, and what we call caravans in Britain aren’t really a thing in America. Still, we can’t help but laugh at a car named after the boxes of fibreglass misery that ruin Britain’s roads every summer so their owners can spend a weekend emptying their own waste out of a chemical toilet.

Naked actually makes quite a lot of sense as a name for this boxy kei car, which wears its utilitarian styling on its sleeve with features like exposed door hinges and visible rivets. Unfortunately for Daihatsu, there will always be a certain demographic who, no matter how old they are, will find the word ‘naked’ funny. It’s us. We’re the demographic.

We’re so used to praising the Dacia Duster for its value and its rugged likeability that we often forget that it appears to be named after a cleaning implement. It’s presumably supposed to make us think of a trail of dust left behind the car as it bounds along a gravel road, but let’s be honest – as much as we love the Duster, it’s a rubbish name.

Good effort, Renault. We know the convertible Renault Wind’s name is supposed to make us think of sunny days, the open road, the roof down, the breeze in our hair. It doesn’t, though, because once again, our sense of humour stopped developing when we were still in ties and blazers, and therefore the only wind it makes us think of is the one you experience the morning after a particularly punchy curry.

This is a classic case of ‘nice idea, flawed execution’ – yes, a gremlin is an imaginary cheeky, mischievous, impish being, and the AMC Gremlin was supposed to embody those characteristics. But do you really want to name a car after a creature invented as the cause of technical and mechanical malfunctions? No. No you do not.

While there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of naming a cute and cuddly car after a cute and cuddly creature, there’s something about the name of the Reliant Kitten that grates. Maybe it’s just the fact that an actual kitten is so helplessly adorable that we can’t begin to take the car seriously. Then again, the Kitten was just a four-wheeled version of the Robin, so Reliant had form here…

Innocent intentions here from MG – the Midget, after all, was the smallest sports car the company made, and we’re sure that when it launched in 1961, nary an eyebrow was raised at the name chosen for it. If you tried to call a car the Midget in 2026, though, we’re not sure the same would be true. Or would it? Daihatsu has also used the name on small trucks, including on a concept unveiled as recently as last year. Hmm.

Admittedly, the closely related Nissan Cedric and Gloria appeared in the 1960s and ’50s, respectively, back when the names Cedric and Gloria probably didn’t put you in mind of the nice old couple who used to live next door to you when you were growing up. But, with the greatest of respect to any Cedrics or Glorias reading this, have they ever been cool names?

Jimmy? Like, short for James? The GMC James? Supposedly, this badge-engineered Chevy Blazer actually got its name from the way ‘GM’ sounds when spoken out loud. Except… GM. ‘Gee em’. ‘Geem’. Nope. Not hearing it. Get back to us when you’ve come out with the GMC Danny, Dave and Gazza, please.

A stroke of self-deprecating marketing genius of the sort only Volkswagen was once capable of, or the laziest automotive naming decision ever? We’re honestly not sure. This Beetle-based utility vehicle was only ever officially known as the Thing in the US – here in Britain, it was the Trekker, which was less distinctive, but probably made it an easier sell to, well, anyone.

Allegedly, the name of the Suzuki Celerio derives from the Latin word ‘celer’, meaning ‘fast’ – same origin as ‘accelerate’, y’see. Just two problems. One, the Suzuki Celerio was the diametric opposite of fast, and two, said out loud, it’s essentially a bland, watery, vegetable with an extra vowel sound on the end. Then again, bland and watery is quite an apt description of the Celerio.

Beloved by the van life crowd, there’s rather a lot to unpack with the name of the Mazda Bongo Friendee. Bongo, we’re on top of – it’s a type of drum. Strange thing to name a van after, but hey. But Friendee? One who is friended, in the same way that an employee is employed? That’s as good as we’ve got for that one, we’re afraid.

Fascinating little car, the kei-class Mitsubishi Minica. The hotted-up Dangan ZZ version was the first mass-produced car with five valves per cylinder, and there was also a version that had one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger side. And that version, utterly inexplicably, was called the Minica Lettuce – because nothing says ‘asymmetrically-doored hatchback’ like a wet vegetable.

There really is a lot to take in with the short-lived Renault Kangoo Be Bop. For starters, it was a tiny two-door van seemingly designed for the sole purpose of carrying grandfather clocks or big toy giraffes, since the rear windscreen and back half of the roof retracted to leave it as a semi-open top. Oh yeah, and did we mention it was called the Kangoo Be Bop?

Granted, you’d very rarely have seen the name of this car in full. The original three-door version was just badged as the MU, but the official line was that it stood for Mysterious Utility. Not sure what’s so mysterious about it, but there you go. Then, a year later in 1990, came the five-door version, which Isuzu called the MU Wizard. Why? Who knows – maybe they used magic to conjure up the extra wheelbase. You’re a wizard, Isuzu.

As we’ve already seen with the Kangoo Be Bop, at the turn of the 2010s, the French car industry appeared to be locked in a contest to see who could give their little van-based people carriers the silliest name. Citroen Nemo Multispace set the bar decently high, but its sibling model, the Peugeot Bipper Tepee, might just take the prize. What on earth is a bipper? And what’s it got to do with a kind of conical tent? Answers on a postcard, please.

Plenty of Chinese cars have names that sound a bit strange to western ears, but most sensibly get a name change before they come to Europe. When GWM first briefly entered the UK market in 2013, for instance, it rather sensibly renamed its Wingle pickup the Steed. It apparently forgot about that second time round, though, happily trying to sell people a car called the Funky Cat. That said, we were quite sad when it was renamed the Ora 03 a year or so later – the name was the best thing about it by miles.

Honda That’s… that’s what? Hello? Where have you gone? Honda explains this kei car’s confounding name in its original press release: “When we see something in our daily lives that strikes our fancy, we say, ‘Hey! That's it!’ Honda chose this name to express the casual, natural relationship they hope That's owners will have with their cars.” At least you can now correct anyone who claims the Kia Cee’d is the only car with an apostrophe in its name.

This total omnishambles of a name is indeed rooted in some kind of logic. It was a special edition of the range-topping, V12-powered, all-wheel drive, long-wheelbase, M division-fettled 7 Series, created by BMW’s Individual personalisation division to celebrate the company’s centenary. Still doesn’t make it a good name, though, and there’s really no need for it to shout at us.

Again with the shouting, guys. We can hear you. We love the retro vibes of this 2025 special edition G-Class, inspired by its ancestor from – well, you can guess which decade – but STRONGER THAN THE 1980s may well just be the biggest stream of meaningless corporate nonsense ever tagged onto a car’s name.

Yes, this really was a real special edition – limited to the Australian market, as far as we can tell. From what we can gather, it was positioned as a sporty model, complete with trinkets like a bodykit, chromed exhaust tips and a sports-style steering wheel and gearknob. None of which explains why it was named like it was trying really hard not to swear.

‘Vel Satis’ sounds like Renault was trying to be all pretentious and give its baffling overgrown posh hatchback thing a Latin name, but the reality is even more stomach-churning – it’s derived from the words ‘velocity’ and ‘satisfaction’. Pass the bucket, please. What’s more, you’d be feeling very little in the way of velocity or satisfaction in a car with, at most, 245bhp and a notoriously rubbish ride.

The Mazda Carol kei car is already curiously named, first appearing around the same time as the Nissan Gloria and Silvia and taking a similar approach by being named after one of your granny’s friends. Then, when it came back in 1989, initially under Mazda’s short-lived Autozam sub-brand, the strangeness was doubled down on with this special edition that sounded like it was tipping a fedora at you.

Whether we’re talking about the 1930s original, the rear-engined ’80s model or the modern and slightly underwhelming VW-built version, ‘rapid’ has been a wildly overambitious moniker for any of the Skoda models that have worn it. We have checked just in case something was getting lost in translation here, but no – rapid means exactly the same thing in Czech as it does in English, so we have no idea what Skoda was thinking.

We have to assume Epica derives from ‘epic’, which begs the question of what exactly about this pitifully bland saloon was epic. The styling? No. The performance? Definitely not. The fact that it was offered with a straight-six engine that – we kid you not – was designed with Porsche’s input? Interesting, but not epic. Sales so abysmal that less than 20 years after its launch, there are comfortably fewer than 40 left on British roads? Well, we suppose that makes it an epic fail.

Wow, what an original take we’re having on the Mitsubishi Carisma! Nobody in the history of car journalism has ever pointed out the deep irony of this name being applied to a crushingly dull car before! Yeah, fair enough. This one’s been pointed out many, many times before. Doesn’t stop it from being true, though.

The Proton Savvy cost a little under £6,000 when it first launched in 2005, so we suppose you could be called financially savvy for buying one, much in the same way you’d be financially savvy if you ate nothing but supermarket own-brand instant noodles every day for the rest of your life. There are many ways in which that would be a deeply un-savvy move, though, and so it goes for the car, too.

The Honda Legend was far from a bad car – in fact, if you’re after an enormously comfy and reliable motorway cruiser and don’t mind feeding a very hungry V6, it’s quite a shrewd used buy – but the name really rather promises a lot that we’re not sure the car delivers on. Perhaps Honda Decent, Honda Okay or Honda Nice Idea but I Think I’ll Just Buy an Audi A6 would be more apt.

Taken literally, ‘stellar’ means of or relating to the stars. Taken figuratively, it’s a term of seriously high praise. The Hyundai Stellar definitely doesn’t come from outer space (as far as we’re aware, at least), and though it was a well-made, comfy and good value car, we’re not sure the other meaning is too appropriate either – although you might have thought differently when you laid eyes on a Stellar minicab at the end of a heavy night out in the late ’80s.

What are we supposed to be intrigued by? The styling that appeared to have been created by gently shaving bits off a bar of soap? The interior plastics that seemed to be made out of melted-down Action Man figures? The fact that initially, it had a 3.8-litre V6 with just 195bhp? We suppose that last bit’s intriguing inasmuch as it shouldn’t be possible to get so little power out of so much engine.

Sebring is one of the oldest and most revered race circuits in America, the home of one of the crown jewels of endurance racing. The perfect name, then, for an ugly, underpowered, poorly-made, slow, chintzy, cramped, uncomfortable and joyless saloon car from a brand with a piddling amount of motorsports heritage. Sorry, did we say perfect? We meant the exact opposite of that.