German car names are now extinct.
Karl was the last.
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Of course, the ”VOLKSWAGEN“ umbrella brand still exists — It barely gets more German — as well as a few family names (e.g. Porsche) and abbreviations (e.g. BMW). Apart from that, the Chinese niche brand LANDWIND and the American mobility provider UBER still persist among the last German-inspired corporate brands in the worldwide automotive sector.
Afraid of German car names?
It wasn't always that way. The older among us still remember KADETT, REKORD and KAPITÄN from Opel, TAUNUS from Ford or PRINZ from NSU. All the more astonishing that the country where the automobile was invented no longer features model names in the local language. Anyone who now says that this is due to the internationalization of the markets may follow the intentions of brand managers, but they are not necessarily right. Typical German brand names such as “Jägermeister” prove that you can be successful worldwide even with an "umlaut".
Once, I had the luck to get to know the American late night legend Jay Leno. Insiders know that Leno owns one of the largest private car collections in the USA. Jay Leno told me: “I love German cars, but I'll never understand why Porsche names its models after Caribbean money laundering states and French colonial cities.” I couldn't answer that question for him either.
Artificial names are more likely to be mixed up and harder to assign to an umbrella brand
Being a brand means being different. Not all manufacturers take this to heart. Before we as Endmark developed Opel's MOKKA brand name, we conducted a survey among auto-affine people. One of the questions was “What is an AGILA?“ with the answers: Toyota, Renault, Suzuki, Kia and Opel. Only around 3% knew that it was an OPEL.
A conclusion from this: abstractions are more likely to be mixed up and harder to assign to an umbrella brand, especially when it comes to a niche product. The choice for MOKKA was therefore a deliberate return to lexical names (such as Rekord, Manta and Ascona), with which Opel was once the market leader in Germany in the 1970s. These names are not all as explicitly German as the subsequent Opel KARL, but they remain noticeably different from the others.
Bernd M. Samland
