Drive Times Five
Five cars with terrible celestial names
After animals, car names derived from celestial bodies or events are probably the most common, as the new Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross SUV handily demonstrates. There are a lot of them around, too. But for every cool celestial name, like the Ford Galaxie or Mercury Comet, there are a number of surprisingly lame ones. Today, we look at five truly terrible celestial car names.
Ford Telstar
While the Telstar name has become accepted as a possibly madeup name on a series of mid-size Fords throughout the 1980s and 90s, it is actually named after something exciting and space-y. Well, something that was in space, at least. The Ford was named after a series of satellites owned by American telecom company AT&T, first launched by Nasa in 1962. While the Telstar name has died in the car world, it still lives on in space, with subsequent telecommunications satellites sharing the name. In fact, Telstar 18 and 19 are due to be launched this year, while the original Telstar 1 still orbits the planet: a lonely, unloved relic. Just like the car.
Holden Astra
OK, so the latest Astra is a rather good small car, but they could have tried harder with the name. The Astra name has been liberally spread across a number of small cars in the GM empire. It was Vauxhall’s name for its version of the Opel Kadett D in the UK, while Opel adopted it for the Kadett’s replacement in 1991 and, in Australia, Holden used it on a version of the Nissan Pulsar, before switching to a version of the Opel in the mid-1990s. And now the car that’s called the Cruze everywhere else is also the Astra sedan. So does Astra mean ‘‘confused mess’’ in some sort of celestial sense? Nah, it just means ‘‘star’’ in Latin. Boring as that.
Nissan Tiida
A dull car with a weird name, Tiida isn’t actually a phonetic contraction of ‘‘tedious’’ as you might think. Rather it is the Okinawan word for ‘‘sun’’, which also rather nicely ties the Tiida to its slightly smaller sibling, the Nissan Sunny, as well as the equally celestial, but far cooler (the name, that is, not the car) Pulsar. The Okinawan language is only spoken (mainly by older people) in the southern half of the Japanese Island of Okinawa. It is considered an ‘‘endangered language’’ by Unesco, as it is largely being overtaken by Japanese. So, it’s a funny-looking word from a dying language that means something rather dull. Yep, that sounds like the perfect name for that particular car.
Mitsubishi Starion
OK, so this one isn’t so much lame as it is confusing. The popular story behind the Starion’s name is that the car was supposed to be called the Stallion, but the Japanese engineers couldn’t pronounce it properly, so it became the Starion. To back this odd claim, people often point out that an early logo used in the car’s advertising was a horse’s head. However, Mitsubishi said the name was a contraction of ‘‘Star of Orion’’, while the horse logo was a reference to the mythical horse of Arion from Greek mythology, much like huntsman the star is named after was. Which makes far more sense than no one in a global company not being able to pronounce a word properly.
Mitsubishi Eclipse
This one isn’t lame at all. It involves an M Night Shyamalan-style twist ending, because while Mitsubishi is leaning big on the whole ‘‘moon blocking the sun’’ thing for the new Eclipse Cross, it would seem that the car it takes its name from - the US market Mitsubishi Eclipse coupe - was named after an animal. Yep, Eclipse was a famous British racehorse from the 18th century that won every race he entered (18 starts, 18 wins) and became such a successful sire that his bloodline appears in the pedigree of most modern thoroughbreds. Of course, the horse got his name because he was born during an eclipse, so it all kind of works anyway.