Sometimes there's a real irony in the name given to a car. Like the East German Trabant, the quintessential example of how NOT to design, build and market a car.
Although made from recycled rags turned into plastic, it was a rolling environmental catastrophe, spewing as much noxious emissions as was possible from an engine.
The Trabant was named in the first flush of triumph after the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s - the name is German for satellite.
Today, with so much high technology and reliability available in even the smallest and cheapest modern car, it's amusing to recall names which motormakers will probably never use again because they have a taint of failure as hard to eradicate as a skunk's protective perfume.
Take the Edsel, " the car that nearly sunk the company". In the 1950s Ford huge amounts of money into producing this stylistically extraordinary car at a time when public taste was on the cusp of turning in a completely different direction.
Even though several generations of motorists have come and gone since the failure of the car named after an illustrious Ford scion, it is probably true to say that the company will have a superstitious attitude to it.
Apart from the name Ford itself, the surname of an Irish immigrant to the US who was the first man to literally produce "a people's car", there are many brands named after their founders. Some still exist, others are rapidly becoming historical footnotes.
Some of the defunct ones from this side of the world which can still evoke nostalgia include the Borgward, an upmarket German company set up by Carl of that surname. Possibly the best remembered model is the Isabella, a svelte beauty well named.
From Britain, Morris the company established by William Richard Morris, may well have been the most respected in Britain and Ireland for the longest possible time. His Morris Minor did for British motorists what Volkswagen did for Germany after the second World War. All that's left of his company's legacy now is the Mini brand, now fronting a BMW prestige product.
Interestingly, the recently revived MG brand which has become an integral part of one company's strategy to revive a "true Brit" motor industry, came originally from an abbreviation of Morris Garages, where "hot" versions of Morris cars were produced.
The US has its "dead" names too, names which were once bywords for desirable cars. Cars carrying the names of David Dunbar Buick, James William Packard and Henry and Clem Studebaker are all now extinct in the speeded-up evolutionary process that is the American motor industry.
Walter Chrysler's moniker is still there, of course, but now almost absorbed by that of Gottlieb Daimler, whose own name as a builder of British luxury cars became merged with that of the German carmaker, Carl Benz. The Mercedes part of today's largest luxury brand came from a name given to the cars by the importer of Daimlers to France, in honour of his daughter.
Newcomers from the Pacific Rim have made extraordinary penetrations into modern motoring. Their cars too are often called after founders, if sometimes in a slightly more international form. Toyota is named after Sakichi Toyoda, Mazda after Jujiro Matsuda, and Honda after Soichiro Honda. The Mitsubishi brand, however, comes from the Japanese for "three diamonds", as reflected in the marque's logo. Subaru is the Japanese for the Pleiades constellation, which also figures in that maker's logo.
Some of today's well-known brands have very prosaic DNA. BMW is an acronym for Bayrische Moterenwerke, German for Bavarian Motor Factory, while Fiat similarly comes from Fabrica Italiana Automobil Torini - Italian Car Factory in Turin. SAAB comes from the Swedish initials for Swedish Airplane Ltd - the company started out in the aviation business.
Generally the French recall real people in their brands, such as Andre Citroën, Jean-Jaques Peugeot (who actually died about 100 years before the car was even invented), and Louis Renault. But a now-defunct make which was very popular in the 1950s was SIMCA, an abbreviation from the French for Industrial Association of Automobile Mechanic and Body. You can see why they'd want to abbreviate that.
Perhaps one of the most famous acronymics in motordom is the Jeep brand, now part of the DaimlerChrysler empire but originally produced by the Willys company as a general purpose (GP) military vehicle. GP became Jeep in the kind of linguistic stretch that is often reflected in its often mucky but always very capable history.
And - just like the unfortunate Trabant after the fall of East Germany - the Jeep turned into a cult icon. Another East German nameplate, Sachsenring, never achieved that, even if it was named after a racetrack.