Some cars are named after fighting bulls. Others after cool-sounding winds in Argentina. Others with numbers designating power or engine size, and many with just enough thought to be completely non-offensive.
Then there are the ones you suspect were put together after a pretty heavy night on the town, or with five minutes left of a marketing shift on a Friday. We’ve picked out 10 of the worst car names to ever grace production, and feel free to tell us if we’ve missed any.
Ford Probe
Ford Probe
The Ford Mustang sounded cool, with its name derived both from wild horses and a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Its intended replacement, the Ford Probe, did not sound very cool at all. We’re not sure there’s anything sharing a name with ‘a blunt-ended surgical instrument used for exploring a wound or part of the body’ that possibly could.
This one hits personally, having to explain to my friends at school that I’d just been dropped off in my dad’s Probe.
Haval Jolion Pro
Haval Jolion Pro
When something gets the suffix of ‘Pro’, you can expect it to be a serious bit of kit. The PlayStation 5 Pro, for example, or an iPhone 16 Pro. Closer to home for cars, there’s the Mercedes-AMG GT R Pro.
There’s very little Pro about the Haval Jolion Pro, though, a front-wheel drive Chinese SUV offering up a peak of 186bhp from a 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine.
Daihatsu Scat
Daihatsu Scat
If you Google this one in the UK, you might have to submit your ID to prove you’re over 18. We don’t really want to say any more than that.
Hyundai Kona
For the vast majority of the markets the Hyundai Kona is sold in, it’s a perfectly reasonable name. However, if you’re a Portuguese speaker, you probably can’t help but laugh every single time you see one.
That’s because said out loud, Kona sounds an awful lot like a slang term for female anatomy. Unsurprisingly, it was renamed in Portugal to the Kauai.
Mazda Laputa
On a similar note, for the Japanese market, the Mazda Laputa probably sounded like a perfectly reasonable name for a Kei car.
However, when it found its way to some Spanish-speaking countries, it had to be renamed. Why? Well, ‘Laputa’ in Spanish is in effect calling someone ‘the prostitute’.
Honda e:Ny1
Honda e:Ny1
No, it wasn’t meant to be a clever way of saying ‘anyone’, not that this would’ve made the name Honda chose for this electric SUV any better. e:Ny1 is meant to be a nod to the development of the car with its Chinese partners, but it sounds utterly rubbish and thoughtless.
Vauxhall Adam
Vauxhall Adam, front
Cars named after people important to a company can be cool. Think the Ferrari Enzo, named after founder Enzo Ferrari, or the McLaren Senna, a tribute to the great Ayrton Senna. Heck, even TVR as an abbreviation for Trevor is acceptable given the cars it made.
The Opel Adam perhaps less on the level of cool, but it at least made sense – a cheap, compact car named after Adam Opel, a man passionate about building such things.
So why, then, did the Adam name stay when it arrived in the UK as a Vauxhall? They could’ve gotten away with the Vauxhall Alex, too.
LaFerrari
Ferrari LaFerrari
The LaFerrari is a magnificent car, unfortunately hindered by a less than magnificent name. Sure, describing the car as ‘The Ferrari’ sounded great as a contemporary halo model, but then you realise that LaFerrari was a model name, so it was technically The Ferrari TheFerrari.
Even more perplexing when the car has since been superseded by the F80.
Renault Le Car
Renault Le Car (Credit: Jonathan Kellenberg/Wikicommons)
In the same vein but on a completely different car, the Renault Le Car is what happens when you try to take a French hatchback to America in the ‘70s.
Sold as the perfectly-acceptably named 5 in Europe and briefly in North America, it struggled to gain traction in America. To lean into its Frenchness, ‘Le Car’ was chosen for a rebrand. Someone will have been paid a lot of money for that.
Geely Beauty Leopard
Geely Beauty Leopard
As an abbreviation, the Geely BL doesn’t sound so bad, if a little uninspired. Then you realise that it stands for Beauty Leopard, and you begin to shake your head.
Worse still, this Chinese attempt at a cheap sports car neither had the looks to match ‘beauty’ nor the speed for ‘leopard’. It was apparently the first car with a built-in karaoke machine, though, so there’s that.
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