This seems like something we could calculate or at least estimate.
Limiting the scope to English/Romanised vehicle names, new vehicles are being designed at some rate that can probably have a curve fitted to it; new words are being coined at some rate or other…
But not all vehicles are named after real words - some manufacturers use boring alphanumeric codes and some maufacturers use word-like names instead of actual dictionary words; some dictionary words are probably out of bounds for use as vehicle names, for example it’s unlikely we’d ever see the Nissan Failure or the Honda Clitoris.
Some manufacturers recycle their vehicle names, so those are not a concern, but others are always doing something new. Even if the rate of growth of the dictionary exceeds the rate of new vehicle model release, there is still a limit on the availability of permutations of letters for naming vehicles - no manufacturer is going to choose a name that is too long to fit on the tailgate of the card and probably only a small percentage of say, 20-letter combinations will be anything that makes sense - so we won’t ever see the Ford Bbbbbbbbbbbkklsk.
I suppose the real question is whether we would run out of new names before the demise of the human race, or the end of vehicle manufacture, if that’s sooner.
Quite a few car names are made up already, especially from Japanese manufacturers. I am amused that Toyota went with “Corolla” since the name is comically hard for Asian voices to say. My wife’s name is Suree but after 30 years I’m still not sure because if I ask her it can sound like either Suree or Sulee. She spells it with an “r” but that is just because people told her to do it that way. I definitely say it with an R but her daughter uses L. A lot of people just call her Sue.
At the time, Toyota’s larger model was the Corona, which is Latin for “crown”. So they named their smaller car Corolla, which is Latin for “small crown”. Then they replaced the Corona with the Camry. Camry is essentially an anglicized version of the Japanese word for “crown”. Toyota really likes to name cars with words that mean “crown”.
The car that women are more skilled at operating since they know the controls better.
Men have trouble finding the start button, and they seldom let the car get warmed up enough before driving. Many men hardly seem to be aware that the car even exists.
I heard an interview with Lee Iococca or some other auto industry bigwig several decades ago and he said the most indispensable item on his desk was a dogeared glossary of names from Greek and Roman mythology.
There are lots of interesting questions about when certain names for things will run out. For instance, how long will it be before we run out of the codes for YouTube videos? By the codes, I mean the things that look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=@@@@@@@@@@@, where each of those eleven @s are replaced by a capital letter, a small letter, a dash, or an underlining. Note that this means that there are 64 (which is 2 to the 6th power) possibilities for each of those places, so there are ((2 to the 64h power) to the 11th power) different codes, which means that there are more than 8 followed by two hundred and eleven zeros different codes. Currently there are more than 5 billion YouTube videos produced in the slightly less than 20 years that YouTube has existed. Suppose there are, from now on, a quadrillion YouTube videos produced each year. Then it will take about 8 followed by one hundred and ninety-six zeros years to use up all the possible YouTube codes. It’s usually estimated that the Earth will be habitable for about a billion more years until the sun becomes a red giant. So the makers of YouTube planned well enough.
The most absurd I’ve seen to date is, I think, the Peugeot Bipper
Edit: that is, that I have actually encountered in real life. A quick Google of ‘stupid car names’ brings up a list that puts Bipper in the shade, including:
I don’t think your math is quite correct. If there are 64 possible values for each position in an 11-character string, there are 6411 possible strings, not (264)11. That is 73786976294838206464 possible strings, much less than what you calculated, although likely still far more than will ever be used. At a quadrillion per year, they will last for about 70,000 years.
Wow, in my rabbit-hole adventure googling ‘stupid car names’, I discovered that the Honda Jazz was originally to be called the Honda Fitta, except that means lady parts in Swedish, so maybe they would.
We’ll run out of microbrew names sooner that. I read somewhere that there have already been cases (sorry) where one brewery picked a name that was in use by someone else. Purple Monkey Dishwasher is already taken.
Thank you for getting this right. I first did the arithmetic the way that you did and got an answer like yours. Then I thought I messed up to arithmetic, so I did it again. I then proceeded to mess up the arithmetic for real the second time. This is why it’s a good idea to have all calculations done by several people, not by one.
They can always start borrowing words from dead languages if they run out of English ones. Latin or Latin-sounding words are already somewhat common, see the Toyota ones I mentioned earlier. And “Miata” is apparently a word from Old High German that means “reward”.