Read part one here.
19) Ford Thunderbird
For British people, the name ‘Thunderbird’ is more likely to conjure up images of fantastical jet-age rescue vehicles piloted by freakish dead-eyed, slack-jawed puppets than a big personal luxury car, but for a certain generation, that might make the name of the Ford Thunderbird even cooler than it already is. These two paths met in appalling fashion when the garish 11th-gen Thunderbird appeared in the unwatchable 2004 live-action Thunderbirds remake. Funnily enough, that was pretty much the last we heard of either franchise. Still a cool name, though.
20) HSV Maloo
It makes us terribly, terribly sad that Australia’s domestic car industry is extinct, because it’s deprived the world of any more ludicrous, tire-smoking, V8-powered pickup trucks. The most famous of these, of course, was the HSV Maloo, its name coming from the word for ‘thunder’ in one of the many Aboriginal languages of Australia. Not even the brief and fever-dreamish period where it was sold in Britain with Vauxhall badges could dent that coolness.
21) Hyundai Veloster
If you’re going to make up a word for your car’s name, you’d better be sure you get it right, lest you end up with something like ‘Tiguan’ (a portmanteau of the German words for ‘tiger’ and ‘iguana,’ seriously). Hyundai pulled it off, though. We have no idea what ‘Veloster’ means. ‘Velocity’ and ‘Master,’ perhaps? But it’s a word that rolls off the tongue rather satisfyingly, plus, as the Dacia Bigster has already taught us, any car name that ends in ‘ster’ is usually good.
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22) Jeep Renegade
A prime example of a car that spectacularly underdelivers on the promise of its name. Buy a Jeep Renegade, and you probably picture yourself as a wild west outlaw, a lone rider going from town to town, a folk hero sticking it to The Man. The reality is that you’re thumping about in a half-baked, dated, Wrangler wannabe based on a grab bag of ancient Fiat bits, and the only renegade activity you’ll be doing is sometimes accidentally going 62kph in a 60kph zone. Sorry to shatter your dreams, partner.
23) Jensen Interceptor
We don’t need to explain this one, do we? It’s literally called the Jensen Interceptor. Has there ever been a more appropriate car/name combo? This big, beefy, Chrysler V8-powered grand tourer literally couldn’t have been called anything other than ‘Jensen Interceptor.’ Best of all? The name’s coming back on a spiritual successor later in 2026—and it'll still have a V8! Glory be.
24) Kia Stinger
We can’t pretend Kia has a particularly stellar history of car names. Prior to the Stinger, the company’s only badge of real note was Cee’d, and that was only because of that inexplicable apostrophe. The Stinger wasn’t like any other Kia, though, so it deserved a name that wasn’t like any other Kia. ‘Stinger’ is pretty route one for a sporty car, but hey, it works, and we’re a little surprised nobody else got there first.
25) Lamborghini Countach
Lamborghini is another brand that could have a frankly unfair proportion of this list devoted to it, but we’ll start with one of its few models to deviate from its tradition of naming cars after Spanish fighting bulls. ‘Countach’ is a dialect term from the Piedmont region—essentially that area’s equivalent of ‘crikey!’ And a favorite word of a member of the car’s engineering team. It was jokingly suggested as the name by designer Marcello Gandini, but as history shows, the joke stuck. Countach, indeed.
26) Lamborghini Murcielago
This Lambo’s name does come from a fighting bull, specifically one who was spared after surviving a particularly brutal sparring match in 1879 that saw him withstand 24 jabs of a sword from one of the era’s foremost bullfighters. But what could this exotic-sounding, multisyllabic word possibly translate to in English? That’s right—bat. Obviously. Now you know why Bruce Wayne drove one in The Dark Knight.
27) Lamborghini Temerario
Another bovine Lambo, Sant’Agata’s new 907hp, plug-in hybrid, quote-unquote baby supercar takes its name from a big, angry boy cow who was fighting in the mid-1870s, just a few years before Murcielago. The Spanish word ‘Temerario’ roughly equates to ‘fierce’ or ‘courageous,’ but a more literal translation is ‘reckless.’ Gutsy thing to name a car, really, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Lambo.
28) Land Rover Defender
The Land Rover Defender name isn’t as old as you might think—it’s only been around since 1989, when Land Rover also started building the Discovery and so needed another name to distinguish the models that had previously been just the 90 and 110. We’d say the company did a pretty fantastic job of coming up with a new name that neatly summed up the car’s all-conquering capabilities.
29) Lotus Exige
Across its three generations, the Exige was the most hardcore, track-focused roadgoing model in the Lotus range, so it needed a name that summed this up without deviating from the company’s traditional E-obsessed naming scheme. Cue ‘exiger,’ the French word for ‘demanding.’ That’s certainly apt if you were to try and use the Exige as a day-to-day car, but also simply a very cool-sounding word.
30) Maserati Shamal
Both Maserati and Volkswagen are fond of naming their cars after specific winds—that’s how they both came to sell cars called the Bora—but it somehow always seems cooler when Maserati does it, probably because any Maserati carries an air of inherent coolness about it. Perhaps the coolest of all was the Shamal, a rare and gloriously boxy ’90s GT named after a sandstorm-creating wind that blows through the Middle East a few times a year.
31) Maserati Quattroporte
Further evidence that you can name a car just about anything in Italian and still have it sound good, the Quattroporte’s name famously just means ‘Maserati Four-Doors.’ Because, y’know, it’s a four-door Maserati. If companies from other countries had tried this, we could have ended up with the Volkswagen Viertüren, Volvo Fyradörrar or, erm, Vauxhall Four-Doors. With the greatest of respect to those languages, we don’t think they'd have had quite the same effect.
32) McLaren F1
Usually, generic alphanumeric names do precisely nothing for us, but we can make an exception for the McLaren F1. After all, McLaren was mostly known as a Formula 1 team before its paradigm-shifting hypercar, and with its central driving position, screaming V12, and power and performance figures that embarrassed pretty much anything else on the market, what else was it supposed to be called?
33) Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution FQ-Series
Officially, Mitsubishi has never confirmed what the ‘FQ’ stands for in the various physics-scrambling UK-only models of the Lancer Evolution VIII, IX, and X. Unofficially, though, it’s pretty widely known that this was Mitsubishi’s UK division having a bit of fun. If you’re not already aware, the Q stands for ‘quick,’ and the F? Well, you can work that one out for yourself. To be fair, it was nothing if not accurate.
34) Nissan Pulsar
Another case of ‘cool name, boring car.’ A pulsar is the electrically charged, collapsed remains of a gigantic star. We’re talking about the sort of massive astronomical concepts that serve as useful reminders for how small and insignificant our lives are in the grand scheme of things here, so quite why Nissan thought it was a suitable name for a crushingly bland hatchback is beyond us. Then again, driving a Pulsar is also a good way of reminding yourself how small and insignificant your life is.
35) Oldsmobile Rocket 88
Often cited as the genesis of what would become the muscle car, 1949’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88 hailed from a time when the American car industry was barreling into the future and enraptured by the nascent space race, and kicked off a whole line of cars from the now-deceased manufacturer with equally cool names, including Jetfire, Jetstar, and Starfire (spotting a pattern?) It arguably cemented Oldsmobile as the king of cool car names until Dodge started putting up a fight in the ’60s.
36) Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser
Away from its fixation with space travel and aeronautics, Oldsmobile also took the opportunity in the ’60s to launch a massive station wagon—with skylights at the back that allowed rear passengers to gaze up at the scenery they were travelling through. The vistas they were cruising through, if you will. Indeed, that led to the name ‘Vista Cruiser,’ a fantastically romantic and evocative name for what was fundamentally a practical family car (one that came with the option of a 7.5-liter, 365hp V8, mind you).
NOTE: This story first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
