VehicleVoice

If you’ve read our review of the 2008 Smart ForTwo here, you’ll know that we like its chic design, spacious interior (but only for two), and its point and squirt ability in urban environs. And you’ll also know there was plenty we didn’t like about the Smart, including its limited usefulness (only two seats and tiny cargo area), lack of power, and perhaps most seriously, its frustrating and dim-witted transmission.
As good fortune would have it, we were able to arrange for a brief drive of the Mitsubish i, an interesting extension of the basic Smart idea. The tiny Mitsubishi actually does share some DNA with the Smart. Its platform is related to the Smart’s, as is its 3-cylinder engine (but reduced in displacement to – get this – 0.7 liters in order to meet Japanese Kei-class parameters). That means it’s rear-engined and rear-wheel-drive, just like the Smart.

Okay, let me run some names by you:

Charger

Camaro

GTO

I am not easily embracing the trend by U.S. auto manufacturers to use numbers and letters (alphanumerics) to name vehicles. And it seems to be getting more and more commonplace. In the not so distant past, few vehicle names solely involved alphanumerics. There have always been some, but not the barrage that exists in today’s U.S. market. These days it seems nearly every automaker is jumping on the bandwagon, but mostly the trend exists among the luxury brands. Who has decided that luxury cars can only be named with impersonal numbers and letters?
Who Decided Cars and Trucks Sold By Luxury Brands Must Have Alphanumeric Names?
By my count, 11 of the 14 “luxury” brands in the U.S. presently use alphanumeric nomenclature exclusively or nearly exclusively. Another, Lincoln is heading in this direction as indicated by a few of their recent auto show concepts. Porsche is a holdout. It has its venerable 911 model upon which its reputation has been made, but Porsche management has stated that Porsche will use names instead of alphanumerics for future Porsche designations.
Land Rover, on the other hand, is moving towards the dark side of alphanumerics… at least in the USA. Land Rover North America launched its LR3 in 2005 and it has been a good success for them, but in the rest of the world LR3 is the Discovery, a name also well-established in the USA. I don’t particularly like replacing Discovery with LR3. I guess LR3 signifies that it’s the third model in the Land Rover lineup? But it might not mean much to Mr. and Mrs. Average Consumer, and for me Discovery was a perfectly acceptable name for an off-road capable SUV. In an interesting aberration to its naming strategy, after the LR3 was launched, Land Rover launched the Range Rover Sport… a name, not alphanumeric. Weird. But who says naming has to be rational?

At some point, luxury brand A (along with advertising folks) figured that coming up with a string of three letters would be much better and maybe easier than coming up with a good name that actually meant something to consumers. And to keep up with the Jones’ the “name” apparently needs to involve an X (SRX, WRX, LX, RX, etc, etc..) to signify sporty or SUV or crossover or desirable product that consumer A will want to buy.