01) Ariel Nomad
You probably couldn’t live much of a nomadic lifestyle in Ariel’s hilarious dune-buggy-stroke-sports-car mashup, what with the entire lack of luggage space and sleeping quarters and whatnot, but it’s an entirely apt name for a car perfectly at home traversing some wild, untouched wilderness. Even if we can’t imagine most of them see much in the way of wilderness beyond the country club.
02) Aston Martin Valhalla
We could fill up a good chunk of this list with Aston Martins, but we want to at least try and be fair to other manufacturers. We definitely can’t skip over the company’s new mid-engined hybrid supercar, though: It’s a gutsy move to name your car after the utopian paradise in Norse mythology where slain warriors go to blissfully live out their afterlives, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Aston.
Oh, and the figures who guide souls to Valhalla? Valkyries.
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03) Aston Martin Vulcan
The Aston Martin Vulcan is a big, scary, loud, powerful and unbelievably cool-looking car, so it's appropriate for it to be named after a big, scary, loud, powerful and unbelievably cool-looking airplane. In a pleasing passing of the baton, the Aston Vulcan was launched in 2015, the same year the final airworthy Avro Vulcan touched down for the last time, with the two astonishing, howling machines briefly united for a photoshoot that year.
4) Bentley Brooklands
A big, powerful and unashamedly extravagant coupe like the Bentley Brooklands demands an evocative name. The first ever purpose-built motor racing circuit, and a place where Bentley racked up some of its early racing successes, does the trick nicely. Brooklands, after all, was a place where the era’s wealthy thrillseekers went to duke it out, and the Bentley Brooklands is just the sort of car their descendants would drive.
5) Bugatti La Voiture Noire
‘La Voiture Noire’ translates simply to ‘The Black Car,’ which is already a cool if highly literal name. But the name of this £10 million-ish (around P821.5 million) Chiron-based one-off goes deeper than that—it’s a nod to the original ‘La Voiture Noire,’ one of the four Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantics ever built and the personal car of Ettore Bugatti’s son, Jean. The car vanished when its then-owner was fleeing the German invasion of France in 1940, and has never been located, so the modern ‘La Voiture Noire’ pays homage to one of the car world’s great mysteries.
6) Buick Roadmaster
‘Roadmaster’ evokes a feeling of power, of lauding it over all the other mere mortals you share the tarmac with, and we’re sure that was something drivers of the original run of big, elegant Roadmasters, made between the ’30s and ’50s, could relate to. The name’s return in the ’90s as a floppy, leatherette-stuffed Florida retiree’s sedan as well as a gigantic, fake wood-clad station wagon? Maybe not so much, but we’re still quite drawn to that estate.
7) Cadillac Eldorado
Naming a car after a mythical city of gold means the car itself needs to be something pretty special, and initially at least, the Cadillac Eldorado was. The famous 1959 version represents Peak Tailfin in the era where American car design was at the height of its jet-age excess. It’s a beautiful car, which is more than can be said of the front-wheel drive lump the Eldorado had become by the end of its life in 2002, but hey—at least it still had that name.
8) Chevrolet Corvette
Cars named after military vehicles are nothing unusual, but it’s usually planes. Chevrolet looked somewhere altogether damper for its new two-seater convertible sports car in 1953, opting for Corvette after a type of fast, agile warship. Well, fast and agile by the standards of ships, anyway. It’s a cool name, if you can ignore the fact that it most likely originally derives from the Dutch word for ‘basket.’
9) Chevrolet Blazer
To British ears, the word ‘Blazer’ probably conjures up the ill-fitting jacket you were reluctantly made to wear to school, even at the height of summer. Stick it on a boxy ’70s Chevy 4x4 though, and you’ll suddenly picture yourself battering down a dirt track in California, dust billowing behind you as the small-block under the hood makes all of the good V8 noises. Just me? Fair enough.
10) Chrysler Concorde
Concorde is, without a question, the coolest aircraft of all time—stunningly pretty and an astonishing technological achievement that still sounds like it’s from the future even 57 years after it first flew and 23 years since it retired. The Chrysler Concorde is neither stunningly pretty nor an astonishing technological achievement—it’s a mediocre sedan from a fairly bleak era for the American car industry, and that name is pretty much the only worthwhile thing about it.
11) Dacia Bigster
The Dacia Bigster is basically a big Duster, so its name is fairly apt for a company known for its fun but no-nonsense approach to cars. Big plus Duster equals Bigster. We like that, especially because ‘Bigster’ is a lot more fun to say than ‘Sportage,’ ‘RAV4’ or ‘CR-V.’ It sounds like some sort of ’70s slang term—we’re not sure what for, but we can imagine it being said by someone with long, straggly hair and billowy bell-bottom jeans.
12) De Tomaso Mangusta
Proof of the power of the Italian language, the incredibly cool-sounding word ‘mangusta’ actually translates to ‘mongoose.’ Why name a thumping V8 sports car after a small, ferrety mammal? Well, the story goes that a planned deal between company founder Alejandro de Tomaso and Carroll Shelby had fallen through. De Tomaso was unhappy about this, and so named his new car after one of the few animals capable of killing cobras. Get it?
13) Dodge Challenger Hellcat
Any of the gazillion different versions of the modern Dodge Challenger could qualify for a spot on this list (with the possible exception of the Scat Pack, which…ewwww), but as cool car names go, we can’t argue with the first of the ludicrously overpowered supercharged versions, the Challenger Hellcat. Evoking a demonic, fire-breathing feline is cool enough, then you learn it’s actually named after a stumpy but powerful WWII fighter plane. Yes.
14) Dodge Super Bee
Dodge has a fine history of excellent car names (although on the flipside, it’s also the company that once sold a car called the Caravan), but for sheer cool factor, we can’t ignore the high-performance version of the late ’60s Coronet, the Super Bee. It’s possible this name was actually some superb punning—the Super Bee is based on Chrysler’s B-body platform—but it also spawned one of the coolest logos in automotive history, a furious, crash-helmeted, Hemi-powered bumble bee.
15) Eagle Talon
The Talon was the only car from short-lived ’90s Chrysler sub-brand Eagle to be named after part of an actual eagle, and it’s certainly a better bet for a car name than Beak or Cloaca. Frankly, as a rebadged Mitsubishi Eclipse with the option of all-wheel drive and turbo power and the only vaguely interesting car to come from the brand, it was the only model from Eagle’s brief existence worthy of such a name.
16) Ferrari 812 Superfast
Going down an extremely literal, on-the-nose route for your car’s name isn’t always advisable. If every car company did that, we’d have ended up with such delights as the Vauxhall Dull, the BMW Hideous and the Mitsubishi Why Would Anybody Buy This? For a car that hits 100kph in 2.9sec and a top speed of 340kph, though, we think the Ferrari 812 Superfast can get away with it. It’s also a name from Ferrari’s history, although the original 500 Superfast could probably only get away with being called the Reasonablyfast by today’s standards.
17) Ferrari LaFerrari
It takes incredible chutzpah to give your car a name that’s literally just the company name again with ‘The’ stuck in front of it. Again, it’s probably not something, say, Vauxhall could have gotten away with, but once again, Ferrari can somehow get away with it. The LaFerrari’s name, though, did set a bit of a precedent for every Ferrari that’s come since, and we’re not entirely sure any of them have quite lived up to it.
18) Ford Mustang Mach 1
Things that the Ford Mustang shares its name with include a species of feral horse, a gorgeous WWII fighter plane, and a Fender electric guitar. Basically, this isn’t a name that’s applied to uncool objects. Was it fairly audacious of Ford to then name a high-performance version after the literal speed of sound? Absolutely, especially because the Ford Mustang Mach 1 categorically cannot travel at 1,234kph. It somehow pulls it off, though.
NOTE: This story first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
