DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour       

Growing up in Indiana there were two things that were common — swapping baseball cards and sitting alongside the highway identifying car types as they sped by. (Actually there were three if you added cow-tipping to the mix.)

There were several ways to identify them: by year, make and model (or what’s known today as “trim level”). For instance, as Jim Miller and I sat along alongside Route 49 we were as apt to see a 1955 Ford Victoria as we were a 1957 Plymouth Fury. Those were some of the halcyon days of my youth — nothing to do and all day to do it in.

Skip forward a few generations and today it would nearly be impossible to play such a game. Granted there are a lot more nameplates now than there were in the mid/late-1950s but the nomenclature of vehicles is so complicated that one would need a Cray Super Computer to keep all the brands and models straight. But it still might be possible if vehicles had a proper name.

But throughout the years the marketing and design people thought it would be outre (which, by the way is really a dumb-assed word) to name their vehicles with something as mundane as a Capri or Sixty Special. Instead, some of them went to the extreme of giving their vehicles a set of letters instead of an actual name. And it’s interesting that the biggest abusers seem to be the two major domestic luxury car manufacturers — Cadillac and Lincoln.

Let’s go with Cadillac first. It was always with a bit of snobbery that the swells would discuss their Cadillac Fleetwood or their Sedan de Ville. Each of these names would conjure up the image of an expensive and much-desired luxo-boat. Same with Lincoln. You may have been at the Country Club discussing your new Premier or Continental. To quote Joe Schenk, one of my home town’s drunken characters, “You don’t do that no more.”

Unless you are an avid reader of auto industry buff books or you’re just plain car-crazy you will likely not understand when old Reggie, Global Custodian for a major corporation, starts talking about his new DTS, or his CTS-V or even his mid-life crisis car — his sleek XLR.

Same thing with “Wild Bill” Johnson, Chief Regional Cart Wrangler for Wal-Mart when he brags about his slightly-used MKX, or his MKT or even a MKZ; it’s like listening to a conversation between Lady Ga Ga and Nelly Furtado…what are they talking about?!!

When my five-years-younger-than-me brother and I were kids and subjected to long rides with my parents in the family Oldsmobile (an 88 or 98, depending on what kind of year we had at the junkyard) we’d play this game where I’d have Fords and I’d give my brother Studebakers and we’d see who could count the most number of his chosen brand between beginning and ending our hellish ride.

I’d invariably win and often times by big margins. However, were those games to take place today I no doubt would have chosen a vehicle that doesn’t depend on a bunch of letters to describe itself — like Ford-badged cars and light trucks — and probably saddle my brother with something like a Cadillac SRX. In other words, some of the auto manufacturers seem to have conspired to take away the joys of childhood games.

It’s not really so noticeable with the European vehicles that the domestic luxury cars are trying to emulate. For instance, Mercedes-Benz has its product line broken down into nice-lettered classes, like the C-Class or the upscale S-Class. BMW has theirs broken down by Series, like the 3-Series, 5-Series, etc.  Volkswagen, bless their hearts, have pretty much kept to names, like Beetle, Passat, etc.

The Japanese and Koreans have done their part as well. Maybe it’s just the translation but naming a luxury vehicle a Lexus LS or ES is much more preferred than calling it a LTI or a BUM.

Give these vehicles a chance, Mr. Domestic Luxury Automobile Vehicle Manufacturer. Calling a vehicle something as abstract as a three-letter name that even my Uncle Barney couldn’t turn into an off-color acronym doesn’t do much for brand attraction. No, you wouldn’t want to name it a Cadillac “Bob,” but even naming it a Cadillac “Basil” or a Lincoln “Churchill” would sound classier than calling it something like an MKB.

This initial-naming of vehicles may catch the eye of some blueblood from Connecticut whose Daddy is putting him through six years at Yale but it’s lost on the real people of America.

Look at it this way: there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and since I’m not a blood relative of Euclid the Great Mathematician I can’t begin to guess the total number of three-letter combinations one can take from the alphabet but it pales in comparison to the billions of possible names that can be taken from the worlds’ list of words.

I’ll grant you that it may take time for some of them to become accepted, like the Cadillac Timbuktu or the Lincoln Mordechai, but at least it shows some thinking. I know that I’d personally rather drive a Ford Taurus than a Cadillac KMA any day.