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Whether through lack of imagination or a gift for self-promotion, many founders have named their car companies after themselves.
If you go far enough back in the history of Buick, Ford or Suzuki, for example, you’ll find at least one person with those surnames. In some cases you can do this just by looking at who’s in charge today.
Others have given the matter more thought and come up with quite inventive ways of creating names. These, you may agree, are more interesting, and they’re the ones we’re going to be looking at here:
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Acura
Honda’s luxury brand takes its name from the Latin cura, meaning ‘care’ or ‘accuracy’. To emphasise the point still further, the Acura logo is a stylised letter ‘A’ shaped in such a way that it represents a geometric compass, representing precision in drawing.
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Alfa Romeo
Alfa was originally an acronym for [Società] Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili, or Lombard Automobile Factory Company. (Its home town is Milan, capital of the Lombardy region.)
The Romeo part of the name, added five years after Alfa’s creation in 1910, refers to an early boss, the entrepreneur Nicola Romeo (1876-1938). Alfa Romeo became part of Fiat in 1986.
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Alpina
Burkard Bovensiepen did not have far to look for a name for the company he founded in the 1960s devoted to tuning (and later producing high-performance versions of) BMWs.
His father’s typewriter business was called Alpina, and Burkard decided that what was good enough for Bovensiepen Senior was good enough for him.
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Alpine
Dieppe Renault dealer Jean Rédélé won an award in the 1954 Alpine Rally and decided to call his Renault-based sports cars Alpines in memory of that success.
Renault bought him out in the early 1970s and has used the name periodically ever since, most recently for the Alpine A110 which saw the brand reborn, to great acclaim.
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AMG
Now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daimler, AMG started out as a builder of competition engines. Founders Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher did not name it after themselves but did use the initial letters of their surnames.
The ‘G’ stands for the southern German village of Grossaspach, where Aufrecht was born.
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Aston Martin
Of company founders Lionel Martin (1878-1945) and Robert Bamford (1883-1942), only the former’s name found its way into Aston Martin. The first word refers to the Aston Hill hillclimb course in Buckinghamshire where both competed as young men and not, as is sometimes said, to the nearby town of Aston Clinton.
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Audi
August Horch (1868-1951) used his surname for the first car company he founded but could not do so for the second when he fell out with his original board of directors.
A business friend’s son suggested Audi. Horch and audi mean the same thing, being the German and Latin equivalents of the English “listen!”
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BMW
Like several other car company names, that of BMW is simply descriptive. In its early days, BMW built engines in Bavaria, in southern Germany, so it was called Bayerische Motoren Werke.
This translates directly into English as Bavarian Motor Works and more easily as Bavarian engine factory. Perhaps to emphasise its German-ness, ‘Bayerische Motoren Werke’ is today used by BMW even in English-language marketing.
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Cadillac
The second of three businesses created by Henry Ford was originally called the Henry Ford Company. Saved from collapse in 1902, it was renamed after the Sieur de Cadillac, a French explorer who established a fort in the state of Michigan. The fort became the city of Detroit, where Cadillac is still based.
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Caterham
Lotus dealer Graham Nearn bought the rights to manufacture and sell the Lotus Seven in the early 1970s. He couldn’t use the Lotus name, so instead he appropriated that of Caterham, the town south of London where he was based at the time.
The name still stands even though the company now has its headquarters in Crawley.
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Dacia
Although now a Renault subsidiary, Dacia remains proudly Romanian, and is one of that country’s most successful businesses. The original Dacia was an ancient kingdom in central Europe which roughly corresponds to modern Romania. After decades of fighting, it was taken over by the Romans in the second century AD.
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Fiat
The word ‘fiat’ has many meanings, none of which apply to the car manufacturer. In this case it’s another straightforward acronym. The company created in 1899 to build Italian automobiles in a factory in Turin was called the Italian Automobiles Factory of Turin. In Italian this is Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino, shortened to Fiat.
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Hyundai
This is a relatively new brand in motor industry terms, having been formed as part of the Hyundai Group in 1967. Perhaps fittingly, its name suggests that it is a modern company.
Expressed in letters we would recognise, it is closely related to the Korean word hyeondaeseong, which means ‘modernity’
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Infiniti
The name of Nissan’s luxury division is exactly what it sounds like: Infiniti is simply a slightly re-spelling of the word ‘infnity’, using the same pronunciation.
Cars that Europe and Americans know as Infinitis are sold in Japan, but never under that name; they always go under the Nissan name there.
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Isuzu
Although it is based many miles away to the east in Tokyo, Isuzu is named after the Isuzu River, whose mouth is in the city of Ise. The river is famous in Japan because of its association with Ise’s Shinto Grand Shrine, and it is mentioned in many Japanese poems.
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Jaguar
Some models built by the British SS company pre-War were called Jaguar, after the American wildcat. In 1945, SS renamed itself Jaguar, which could not be confused with “any similar foreign name”, almost certainly a reference to the Nazis’ infamous Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS.
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Jeep
The Jeep name is one of the great mysteries of the motor industry. It might derive from GP (General Purpose), or a term used by US Army mechanics in 1914, or even a character in the Popeye cartoons of the 1930s. The only certain thing about its origin is that it is uncertain.
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Kia
There have been several attempts to explain the Kia name, a situation complicated by differences in translation. All, however, suggest that it comes from two characters which mean, broadly, “rising from Asia”, with the sense of going on to spread across the world, as Kia has indeed done.
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Land Rover
From 1948, Land Rover was simply the name given to off-road vehicles produced by Rover, which was better known for its saloon cars. Land Rover was not established as a separate brand until 1978, and it now has nothing to do with the remnants of the Rover company which are largely in Chinese hands.
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Lexus
The luxury arm of Toyota was at one point going to be called Alexis, but it was changed to Lexus to avoid the suggestion of representing a person rather than an object.
An objection by research database company LexisNexis that the name might create confusion was rejected by the American courts.
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Lincoln
Part of the Ford empire since 1922, Lincoln was founded five years earlier by Henry Leland (1843-1932) and his son Wilfred. It was named after Abraham Lincoln, who is said to have been the first US President for whom Henry ever voted, presumably for Lincoln’s second term of office which began when Leland was 21.
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Lotus
If anyone knows how Lotus got its name, they’re not telling. There have been suggestions that it refers to a fruit, a flower or a bathroom fitting, or is a contraction of the auction term ‘lot unsold’. Some of these seem more likely than others, but perhaps none of them is correct.
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Mazda
Mazda has been used as a car name since 1931 and as that of the company formerly known as Toyo Kogyo since 1984. It may be a version of Toyo Kogyo founder Jujro Matsuda’s surname or, perhaps more likely, a reference to Ahura Mazda, supreme being of the Zoroastrian religion.
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Mercedes-Benz
Daimler agent Emil Jellinek commissioned a sports car from the company around the turn of the 20th century and named it after his daughter, Mercedes. The success of the car led to Daimler calling later ones Mercedes too. When Daimler merged with Benz in 1926, all future cars were known as Mercedes-Benz. Ironically perhaps, the lady Mercedes never cared much for cars it seems; she died in 1929, aged just 39.
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MINI
Although it is always spelled with capital letters, MINI is not an acronym. The BMW-owned brand simply refers to the classic Mini whose styling influences the current models.
Ironically, by no means were all the classic versions given this name, though every one of those built since 2000 has been.
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Mitsubishi
One of several possible translations of the Japanese mitsubishi is ‘three diamonds’, which describes the company logo. Mitsubishi’s use of both goes much further back than the company’s history of making cars.
The name first appeared in 1873, three years after Mitsubishi had been founded as a shipping company.
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Nissan
The holding company which built, among other things, Datsun cars was originally known as Nihon Sangyo. This was abbreviated to Nissan on the Japanese stock exchange.
Over the years, Nissan eventually came to be used as the official name both of the company and of the cars it manufactured.
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Ram
The Ram name comes from the truck company’s logo, which was designed in the late 1920s for Dodge by Avard T. Fairbanks. When the Dodge and Ram brands were separated after the Fiat-Chrysler merger in 2009, Ram got to keep the logo and Dodge had to come up with a new one.
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Range Rover
The original Range Rover, launched in 1970, was the second Rover off-road vehicle after the Land Rover. Although there are now several models, Range Rover has never become a stand-alone brand. It is still simply a name used by Land Rover, which was separated from Rover in 1978 and is now part of Jaguar Land Rover.
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Saab
The Saab brand was created as the automotive subsidiary of a Swedish aerospace and defence company with the same name.
It is an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan AB, which translates into English as ‘Swedish Aeroplane Company Ltd.’ The Saab Group still exists, though the car company does not.
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SEAT
Although it is now part of the Volkswagen group, SEAT was created to build Fiats under licence in Spain, which it did with such success that it became part of the Spanish economic miracle.
Like Fiat, its name is an acronym, standing for Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo, or Spanish Touring Car Company.
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smart
After years of trying, watch company Swatch finally found a collaborator for its small-car project in Daimler-Benz. Swatch is still represented in the smart name, which stands for Swatch Mercedes Art, though Daimler took over the project entirely soon after becoming part of it.
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SsangYong
Under Indian ownership nowadays, SsangYong is a South Korean brand whose name means "double dragon". This is quite significant in Korea, where dragons have been a feature of mythology and art for many centuries.
The brand operated under several other names until it was acquired by the SsangYong Business Group in the 1980s.
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Subaru
Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster. Its logo shows six of those stars, five of them representing the five companies amalgamated into Fuji Heavy Industries in the 1950s.
The sixth refers to the brand formed when Fuji decided to enter the car business.
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Tesla
Tesla is named after the brilliant expatriate Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, who emigrated to the US in 1884 and quickly showed a special talent for electrical work.
He died in 1943, 60 years too early to have had anything to do with the company named after him.
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Toyota
While it is true that Toyota was named after its founder and should not really be included here, the story is a little complicated. Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930) used his own name for his cars until it was changed to Toyota.
The new word sounded clearer and was simpler to write in Japanese characters.
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TVR
Trevor Wilkinson (1923-2008) created a company called Trevcar Motors in 1946 but quickly decided that he could come up with something better.
He did this by removing four letters from his first name and writing the others in capitals. The result was TVR, a name which was later to mean so much to fans of powerful sports cars.
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Vauxhall
Vauxhall was founded as a marine engineering company in that district of south London in 1857. The name refers to the London home of a 13th century soldier known as Fawkes de Breauté, among several similar possibilties.
The building was known first as Fawkes Hall, then as Foxhall before becoming Vauxhall
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Volkswagen
The Volkswagen name was first used for the original Beetle, designed by Ferdinand Porsche in response to Adolf Hitler’s call for something that could be used as transport by ordinary Germans.
It later became the name of the company resurrected after World War Two by British Army officer Major Ivan Hirst.
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Volvo
Volvo started out as a car-making subsidiary of the Swedish bearing manufacturer SKF. Its name refers to SKF’s main line of business. Volvo is the Latin word for “I roll”, or perhaps “I revolve” – precisely what a mechanical component is able to do if fitted with an efficient bearing.
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