What's in a car's name?

Carina, Cortina and Cherry -_names like these used to go down fine with car-buyers but those days are over.

Such monikers would almost certainly spell financial ruin for modern car manufacturers who opt for the exotic, mysterious aura which surrounds names like Tiguan, Touareg and Qashqai.

The people who come up with these weird and wonderful tags call themselves "verbal designers" and Sybille Kircher from the company Nobel International in Dusseldorf is one of them along with Manfred Gotta from Baden-Baden.

The names they conjure up must be easy to pronounce, marketable all over the world and be free of negative connotations.

It's a tall order considering that 100,000 different car names have already been legally registered.

Indeed sometimes as many as 10,000 different suggestions are put forward by an agency before the name of a new model is finally decided upon.

In the 1960s, the names of cars were easy to remember and tended to reflect the status and upward social mobility of those who drove them.

In Germany, General Motors subsidiary Opel opted for the maritime hierarchy of models such the Kadett (cadet), Kapitaen (captain) or Admiral whose place in the range was dictated by their price and size.

"Opel went for the Diplomat and Senator while Ford replied with the Escort and Consul," said Kirchner.

British car-makers like Morris and Austin preferred the reliable solidity of geographical names like Cambridge and Oxford for its bread-and-butter saloons while one luxury model was called the Westminster.

Increasing prosperity in the 1970s combined with a desire to travel saw a proliferation of names which conjured up sunny Mediterranean climes.

The Ford Capri and Granada were classic examples while Volkswagen named its sporty models after the hot desert winds Scirocco and Passat.

The 1980s were more sporting and while Boris Becker and Steffi Graf dominated the world of tennis, VW relied on the association with upmarket leisure pursuits to help sell the Golf and Polo.

The end of the East-West conflict in the 1990s saw a trend towards futuristic names like Astra, Omega and Mondeo - the Ford title derives from the Latin word mundus meaning world.

Nowadays, the car companies hope that by using names with recurring letters buyers will associate them with a particular manufacturer's "family" of models. French maker Citroen tried the "X factor" with Saxo, Xantia and Xsara while Toyota of Japan dropped Corolla, Starlet and Carina in favour of "is" endings and came up with Auris, Yaris and Avensis.

"These days women's names for cars are considered unsexy and inappropriate," explained Kircher.

But what is the point of naming a car in the first place? After all, premium makers like Audi, BMW and Mercedes are happy to still use letter and number combinations.

"A name is an instrument, a way of conjuring up an image. Numbers and letters are harder to remember and also harder to patent," said Germany's leading car expert Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer from Gelsenkirchen Technical University.

He said it was worth noting that Porsche had switched to names despite having created one of the most iconic number combinations - the "911" - in the automotive world.

"You see the name doesn't actually have to mean anything and it's possible to imbue artificial ones with meaning. The name becomes synonymous with the car - after all, no one actually thinks of as a desert wind when he hears or sees Passat," said Dudenhoeffer.

"Names like Smart and Twingo seem to fit the cars they adorn and that goes down well with the customers."

According to Manfred Gotta, the name must simply suit the character of the car it adorns.

"Cayenne, Cayman and Boxster do not need much explaining," said Gotta. Mercedes on the other hand, may be heading for problems with its nomenclature - "the combination of letters like CLK, CLS and so on makes it hard to distinguish individual models," said Gotta.

In this new millennium, Mediterranean flair does not sell cars, said Kircher. Exotic-sounding titles which hint at adventure and far-off places are likely to prevail along with extravagant word creations such as Aygo, a corruption of the English "I go" by Toyota which suggests individual mobility and freedom or else Kia's clever Pro Ceed with its feeling of action and moving forward.