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2026 Chevrolet Suburban ReviewCars Named After Places
Naming cars after places has a long history. From the Pontiac Bonneville to the Subaru Baja, we dive into automotive geography.A Car By Any Other Name…
When it comes to naming cars, automotive marketers have a handful of go-to options. First, there’s naming cars after animals which can be hit and miss. The Bronco and Beetle were effective, evocative names that helped ensure those vehicles’ place in the public consciousness. The Mercury Sable and Hyundai Tiburon on the other hand were not the greatest names, one is a relative of the weasel and the other requires a Spanish-to-English dictionary. Less popular today but significant historically has been giving cars celestial names like Comet, Pulsar, and Nova.
By far the most popular convention has been naming cars after places. This makes sense. Cars take you from one place to another. Geography is baked into the user experience. Like animal and celestial names, place names are intended to evoke a specific aesthetic or feeling associated with that locality.
Many names reflect the adventurousness of the American West or the sophistication of Continental Europe. These are at their best when applied to rugged SUVs or high-end luxury cars, but automotive marketers have not been shy about embellishing the attributes of a vehicle with place names, however ironic they might be.
Cars Named After Places in the American West
This is our biggest genre for cars named after places. Hyundai/Kia seems particularly obsessed with naming their vehicles after places in the American West snatching up names like the Kia Telluride, Rio, and Sedona while Hyundai chose Palisade (Colorado), Santa Fe, Tucson, and Veracruz (a Mexican state and coastal city). Pontiac chose Bonneville, referencing the famed salt flats where world land speed records have long been set, along with Montana, Phoenix (both a place and animal name, a nice two-for), and Ventura.
Chrysler had their Aspen and Pacifica, Volkswagen the Toas, and Subaru the Baja. Toyota isn’t much for place names but when they have used them, they’ve been places in the West like Tacoma and Sequioa (also a tree, another two-for). Buick liked the Pacific Northwest so much they used both Cascadia and Ranier. Suzuki went with Reno, which is Spanish for reindeer. GM is also big on place names, including those in the American West like the Chevy Tahoe and Silverado and the GMC Sierra, Sanoma, and Yukon.
And then there are all the Jeep Wrangler geographical trims, most of which reference places in the American West. There’s the Big Bear, Moab, Sport Mojave, Rubicon (a reference to the Rubicon trail not the river in Italy), and the Rio Grande. Then there’s the Smoky Mountain, trading the Rockies for Appalachia, and further afield the Sahara, Artic, and, generically, the Back Country.
Cars Named After Coastal Cities
Speaking of Chevrolet, they had a whole naming convention in the 1950s that centered on naming their cars not just after places but specifically after coastal cities. These included the Chevy Delray, Chevy Biscayne, Chevy Bel Air, and the Chevy Malibu. Chevy broke with convention for the introduction of the Impala in 1958 but made up for this stray animal reference by returning to coastal cities with the Chevy Monte Carlo in 1969. Chevy isn’t the only one who likes an ocean-front view. Mercury had their Monterey, again Hyundai had the Veracruz, and Buick grandiosely and ironically claimed the name Riveria taken from the region in southern France.
Cars Named After Islands
If, when naming a car after a place, the amount of coastline possibly matters, there’s theoretical benefit to dispensing with a merely coastal locale for a full-on island. For these we jet-set the world over from the Chevy Corsica named for Napolean’s birthplace to the Chevy Kodiak, both an island and a giant brown bear (another two-for!). The Hyundai Kona sort of counts since Kona is the western portion of the Big Island of Hawaii. Then there’s Pontiac Catalina off the coast from Los Angeles and the Chevy Biscayne, both the bay and island just southeast of Miami. The Ford Granada referenced the tropical island nation off the coast of Venezuela.
Cars Named After Places in Europe
We’ve already mentioned the Chevy Corsica and Buick Riviera, but these merely scratch the surface of the European place names used for cars. Like the Riviera, carmakers have used French names to lend a sense of refinement to their cars, deservedly or not. It’s a fitting connotation for the Cadillac Seville or Bentley Arnage, but less too for the Plymouth Savoy. The same phenomenon can be seen as Ferrari, that most Italian of carmakers, named their cars the Roma, Modena, and Italia while the Mercury Milan and Kia Sorento were decidedly less Italian. The Mercury Park Lane, in case you’re wondering, gets its name from the thoroughfare in London.
Cars Named After Geographic Features
The most generic of car place name sub-genres has to be using geographic features. Some of these work exceptionally well, like in the case of GMC with their Terrain, Canyon, and Savana. Japanese car companies are fond of this approach with the Toyota Tundra, Suzuki Equator pickup, and of course the Subaru Outback. Chrysler and Chevy demonstrate the longevity of this convention with the old school Town & Country and Suburban names. Ferrari covered all the bases at once with the Mondial, an Italian adjective referring to the whole of the world.
Cars Named After Places in New York City
From the entire world to the highly specific, there are at least three cars named after places in New York City, the Subaru Tribeca (try figuring that one out), the Buick Park Avenue, and the Chrysler Fifth Avenue.
Cars Named After Racetracks
We already mentioned the Pontiac Bonneville and its reference to the Bonneville Salt Flats, but there are other cars similarly titled at the intersection of motorsport and geography. Bently did it not once but twice, first with the Bently Brooklands for the racetrack in England and again with the Bently Mulsanne for the Mulsanne Straight on the Circuit de la Sarthe on which the 24 Hours of Le Mans is run. Chrysler did it twice, christening the Sebring after the town in Florida which hosts the famous racetrack of the same name and with the Dodge Daytona, also named after a Florida racetrack and the famous beach that hosted many land speed record attempts.
Cars Named After Geographically Specific Winds
There are at least two cars whose names trace back to geographically specific winds. The Volkswagen Scirocco is the Italianized form of sirocco the dry Mediterranean wind the blows northward from Libya. Then there’s the Maserati Grecale, which translates from the Italian as the Greek wind. Given the negative connotation, we don’t expect Indian carmaker Tata to adopt monsoon, the winds that bring the annual deluge to western India.
Cars Named After Seemingly Random Places
Rounding things out are a random assortment of place named cars like the Mercury Montclair for Montclair, New Jersey, the Buick La Crosse for La Crosse, Wisconsin, and the Chrysler Newport for Newport, Rhode Island. The Chrysler Windsor is not so random a name considering Windsor, Ontario was basically the Detroit of Canada hosting facilities for GM, Packard, Ford, and Chrysler.
Oddest of all place names is the Maserati Levante, Italian for “the east or the place where the sun rises” and referencing more specifically the Levant region in the Middle East centering on Syria and surrounding environs.
