Did a quick search so apologize if I missed it.
VW Atlas (mountains).
It certainly answers the question of “What’s the most insensitive name for a vehicle?”
“My cousin died in an avalanche!”
“The truck or. . .?”
A couple days ago when the bit about the Chevy Avalanche SUV-cum-pickup was first posted I got to thinking:
- Is the avalanche only the moving stuff while it’s moving, or does the term encompass the damaged area uphill where the stuff used to be, and / or the new pile of stuff downhill after everything quits moving?
Hmm? I wasn’t sure. After some wiki research it turns out “avalanche” is the process of stuff falling down the hill, as well as (usually) the stuff itself while falling down the hill. What’s left at the bottom when the dust settles is generally called a “debris field”.
I think Debris Field would be a very bad geophysical name for an SUV.
Might even unseat @Chefguy’s suggestion for least sensitive vehicle name. 
What were they THINKING? 
There are a few named parts of an avalanche, one of which (Crown) is already in use.
Great info. Thank you.
I also learned that “avalanche” refers to snow and ice, not dirt. A dirt and rocks “avalanche” is properly a “landslide”.
I had always thought “avalanche” was a generic term for any crap sliding uncontrolled down a slope. Not so sayeth the all-knowing wiki.
There is one additional phenomenon in the avalanche family. In some very rainy, rocky areas like Milford Sound, NZ the forests grow essentially on top of bare rock. Actually, lichen and mosses build up enough purchase for trees to grow, but they are barely anchored to the rock. In storms, whole areas can let go, sending masses of trees into the Sound and leaving being bare rock. These are Tree Avalanches (sometimes called treevalanches).
Any location in California that was named before 1840 has a Spanish name.
The Toyota Tacoma takes its name not from the city in Washington, but the mountain the city is named for, also known as Mt. Rainier.
The name “Tacoma” was derived from the Coast Salish peoples’ name for Mount Rainier in the U.S. state of Washington.
The people that were in California before the Spanish certainly had place names.
Of course, but that’s not the point. The question is: did the marketers name the vehicle after the city or from the Spanish word for “King’s mountain”? Did they know enough Spanish to do the latter? I have doubts.
Consider that the typical customer was monolingual English, which the marketers know. Marketers, if they’re at all good, put themselves in the place of the typical customer. Is that typical customer, seeing the name “Monterey” going to think “King’s Mountain” or “city in California”? Obviously the latter.
I also have doubts here. Pretty much the same logic. The etymology of the name is true, but that doesn’t mean the marketers went to that etymology to get the name.