I know I heard a while back that the Chevy Apache and / or the Jeep Comanche were not that popular in the Southwest because Apache and Comanche were feared enemies of the Navajo, Hopi, Ute and other groups who would not buy a vehicle named for their enemies.
However I can’t find anything about this when I do a search. Does anyone have information on this or any recollections?
I have no data but I honestly do not believe that the Native American market is very significant for cars.
Or the Chevy Apache and Jeep Comanche just weren’t very good cars regardless of what you named them. See Occam’s Razor.
How about Pontiacs and Winnebagos? Where would sales be affected by those?
Chrysler already had truck models when the Comanche came out. Why have a chopped Cherokee when you can buy a ‘real truck’?
The Piper Apache and the Piper Comanche were both very successful.
Considering that Native Americans make up 0.8% of the American population, I can’t see how their opinions would have any impact one way or another.
OP is specifying that the cars purportedly didn’t sell well in very specific regions with mostly low populations, not that the manufacturer lost enough sales to take notice. Some of these regions have a majority Native population, including the Navajo plurality Navajo County, AZ, and the 73% Native, mostly Navajo, and interestingly named Apache county, Arizona (the Navajo are an Apachean people).
The story itself has shades of the urban legend story that the Chevy Nova didn’t sell well in Mexico. That doesn’t make this current legend false, but does warrant the dubious smiley :dubious:.
Perhaps because both OP names are also names of attack helicopters, the car versions of them seem especially lane. 
I gather that the Mazda LaPuta and the Mitsubishi Pajero, didn’t sell too well in Spain or Mexico, or the Opel Ascona in Portugal.
‘Mitsubishi Masturbator’ has a ring to it.
I live in NYC, and I have never seen an off-road 4x4 Lenape.
I always heard the one about the Chevy Nova (no- va, doesn’t go/work) in the Mexican market as the disaster that ushered in massive computational language searches to clear branding.
The Jeep Comanche failed because Jeep was not known as a pickup car company and it could not compete with it’s cousin, the Dodge Dakota, or with other, more popular Jeep offerings like the Wrangler, the Cherokee (a Jeep that has in no way suffered from having a Native American name) and the larger and more functional J10/20/Gladiator.
No one doubts you always heard that. Many people, myself included, always heard that but that doesn’t make it true.
Thanks. Ignorance fought. Not only had “I always heard it,” but most of the time it was accompanied by “and is the classic case taught in textbooks and marketing classes”–which also apparently is true, if false.
My Mopar friend always called my Nova the “No Go”.
Nova, no fue, no nunca ire.
And the Commanche was a great truck. I wish I’d never sold mine.
Yeah, the Pajero was called the Montero in the US market and other places where there were a lot of Spanish speakers. I and a Spanish-speaking friend once encountered a Pajero in a French-speaking country and had a good laugh over it.
The Chevy “No-va” story is funny, and I used to kid my brother with it when he owned a Nova, but it isn’t true.
