I SAW a Hillman Avenger on the road the other day and my childhood flashed before me. That was a wilder era than now, in everything from hairstyles to drinking habits. It wasn't unusual then to see a driver taking both sides of the road on the way home from town at night. So, although it seems inappropriate looking back, a car called the Avenger was not out of place, writes Frank McNally.
Whoever thought up the names for Hillman must have what we would now term "issues". The company also produced a car called the Hunter, I recall. In fact, between Hunters and Avengers, and drivers zig-zagging home from the pub, pedestrians had plenty of reason to be nervous.
And yet, even then, the Avenger looked harmless - a look that has greatly increased in the intervening years. It was always a parody of its aggressive aspirations, more redolent of the camp TV series The Avengers (then starring Joanna Lumley) than anything more violent.
Car names of the era were not always macho. Some were exotic and romantic, like the Ford Capri. In my teenage years, the Capri was considered a sure-fire babe magnet - not that I was ever in a position to test-drive this theory. And by the time I could afford one, the car's image had taken a dent.
During my first office job, there was a very pretty young woman working on another floor, whose features I used admire from a distance. For a long time, I had never heard her speak. But I liked to think she sounded like Joanna Lumley, until one day I overheard her saying a single sentence, namely: "I hear the Capri is fierce hard on petherdl". It was an accent that could cut turf. Ashamed as I am to admit it, any romance the car still held died there and then, and not just because of concerns about fuel efficiency.
Silly car names didn't start in the 1970s or 1980s, of course, and they didn't end then either. Today, the spiritual offspring of Hunters and Avengers are SUVs, which bear epic, adventurous names like "Odyssey" and "Explorer" as they penetrate uncharted Dublin suburbs en route to school or supermarket. Unlike the hapless Avenger, the average SUV does at least have the power to intimidate. All it lacks, frequently, is context.
Speaking of SUVs, some car names sound good in one language, while causing problems in others. Take the Mitsubishi Pajero, called after a mountain cat in South America. Unfortunately, in Spanish, Pajero also means "wanker". So, in countries with an Hispanic population, the vehicle is called "Montero" instead. (An even more fundamental problem affected a car produced by Chevrolet once, called the "Nova" - the problem being that, in Spanish, Nova means "won't go".) Some names become dubious only in retrospect - the Dodge Swinger, for example, a few models of which are probably still on the road in the US, decades after their heyday. Since which time, the name has become Dodg-y in more ways than one.
In a more innocent era, "swinger" didn't imply anything more about your lifestyle than, say, the former name of a popular Irish showband - Big Tom and the Mainliners - implied about theirs. But the meaning of words evolves in unpredictable ways.
Rather than be confused with intravenous drug-users, the Mainliners had to become the Travellers (and even that word has changed meaning since). In such an uncertain world, I'm just amazed that the Ford Escort retained respectability as long as it did.
It's debatable whether the name alone can make or break a car. One of the cautionary tales is the Edsel, the greatest flop in Ford history. Many reasons have been advanced for its failure - not least that in an age (the late 1950s) when cars still traded heavily on phallic symbolism, the Edsel's V-shaped grille was the very opposite of phallic. But the name was certainly part of its problem.
The company had considered many options, even approaching the poet Marianne Moore for suggestions. Rejecting her ideas - which included "Utilian Turtletop", and "Mongoose Civique" - was probably not a mistake. But having dismissed all alternatives, Ford finally named the car after the company founder's son, making it sound like a tractor.
Received wisdom is that, except at the top of the market, cars need catchy names. When Mercedes or BMW use mere alpha-numerics - the S300 series or whatever - it sounds classy. But other brands have to captivate the public with something more evocative or aspirational.
Even so, you'd wonder how some names survived market research. Daihutsu's "Charade", for example. Who ever decided that a word meaning "hollow pretence" would sell cars? Or that a vehicle called the "Mirage" (Mitsubishi again) would reassure buyers about a dealer's sincerity? Also, while animal names are proven winners, what about the Fiat Panda? Cute and black-and-white: yes, I get that much. But slow-moving, threatened with extinction, and usually wrapped around a tree? And there are worse names than that. When something mechanical breaks down, we speak of "a gremlin in the works". But a car actually called the Gremlin escaped the works of a US manufacturer, AMC, in the 1970s.
The same can't be said for the "Banshee", although that was the name given to a series of experimental cars produced in-house by Pontiac. The company must have been unaware, initially, that a Banshee was something that produced a high-pitched wail and presaged imminent death. I wonder if it was the marketing department or the lawyers who pointed it out first.