Thank god they passed on the Toyota Areola and the Volkswagen Vas Deferens.
In Dr. Drake’s defense, I too have noticed people using the term “urban myth” or “urban legend” where they simply mean “myth” or mistaken belief, one borderline example perhaps being Punoqllads’s post here, though his is not as egregious as some I’ve seen. An “urban legend” means something more specific than just “something people mistakenly believe.”
so, I guess that The Master’s reference, although some 25 years old, is probably still relevant. The guys in ties try to come up with generic names that sound like SOMEthing, but mean NOTHING. And despite some assertions to the contrary, I think most of them also try to design cars that look pretty much like a CAR, rather than something that looks unique. Ok, I think that’s what I was wondering.
ROFLMAO. 
Finally someone who understands the concept of a joke. You will not that I said that I believe, not knew for a fact that it was re-badged. Just repeating that part of the urban myth/ledged (??? WTF was that all about).
But as for someone who actually has worked on Nova’s back in the the seventies with my cousins I can tell you that it was a common “joke” among us. My Nova no va! Simiarly we use refer to the Yugo as the you go it dosen’t, buy two you’ll need the parts.
To continue the brief hijack:
Punoqllads, I thought your Canadian example was funny. I’m sure JHB will accept the tadpole. I hear they’re good in coke.
TheLoadedDog, I wasn’t trying to be snotty. “Urban legend” is a technical term used by folklorists for a specific genre of traditional narrative that includes stories about car names. “Urban myth” is not a technical term at all. I thought GQ was a good place to mention this.
In ordinary conversation, English speakers can use both “myth” and “legend” interchangeably, but it’s kind of like using “quart” and “liter” interchangeably: close, but not the same. From Snopes
End hijack. We now continue your regularly scheduled programming.
Yep. Around here, they changed the name to the Mitsubishi Montero rather quickly, although I’m told that the Masturbation Buggy still retains its original name in countries that don’t have any significant Spanish-speaking population 
I forgot to put my marketing experience in my earlier post. Not that I am a pro market researcher, but I have taken part in about 2 dozen focus groups and marketing surveys. I think my name has been on some list of “professional survey takers” since I was in college. I was the one who helped decide which commercial you got to see for “Daddy Daycare”!
Anyway, one of my assignments was to look at package designs and colors for a frozen Chinese dinner box. Even though I tried to avoid cliches, I couldn’t help be drawn to the red box with the gold lettering. It just looked more like the color of stereotypical Chinese restaurant signs and menus, I could pick it out easy and identify the box as a Chinese dinner. In other words, I chose the box that looked just like other boxes I have seen in the store, I did not pick ones that stood out as different.
Another one of my assignments was to go to a local hotel where the survey people had rented out a bunch of rooms. Each room had a big garbage can with a white liner. We would go to each room and a lady would come in and spray the inside of the can with a scented bug killer. They would hand us a clipboard with a list of names, we would smell the bug spray, then rank each name. Again, I was drawn to the cliche “safe” names like “mountain spring” and “cinnimon and spice,” names that were similar to the names that I had heard a million times before rather than the names that were different from most other “scent descriptions” I had heard of. I guess I liked the standard or names that sounded familiar.
Maybe this provides some insight into why products such as cars seem to be marketed in such a similar fashion. A lot of consumers feel more “safe” with the familiar.
The general feel of car names in the past 10 to 20 years, at least in the US, seems to be much different than those from the 1950s and 1960s. Families bought Chevrolet Fleetmasters in droves in the late 1940s. If the name was never used, do you think the … oh, Toyota Camry would be flying off showroom floors if it had a name like “Toyota Fleetmaster?” For the sake of argument, assuming the following model names were never used in the past, I can’t imagine anyone flocking to buy a Honda Vista Cruiser, Toyota Brookwood, BMW Styleline, Pontiac Coronet or Ford Biscayne.
Buick model names even today seem to have something of a 1950s-ish feel, recalling a time when Francophilia was far more common in the US. Consider the typical Buick buyer now; someone who reached adulthood in the 1940s or early 1950s.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heilein’s character remarks that a name ending in an “a” implies a C-cup or better. I’ve always, for some reason, agreed.
I apply that to car names, too.