And Roundup by a weed killer. 
Back when Xerox was a household name for “Big stable high tech blue chip company” I pronounced it properly: somewhere between “zeer-ocks” and “zee-rocks”.
As they shrank to an historical also ran, road kill on the (venture) capitalist superhighway, I altered my pronunciation to “ecks-rocks”. As in “former”.
So is the Merkur a “zerati” or an “ecks-rati”? They’re both appropriately silly names for a silly car. 
Actually I realized last night that the girls were Sierra and Savanna, so aside from the spelling (“Savana”) they WERE both GM products!
I don’t envy car companies in having to think up new names.
Because, at first glance, there are 26^N : N<13 options. But of course it has to be readable, not have a rude or weird meaning in any major language, and not be anywhere similar to any brand names out there.
It’s definitely harder than a tech startup, say, which usually are just focused on one market initially, and will probably go through stages of branding so don’t need to pick a perfect name in one shot. Whereas rebranding and marketing completed cars could be an expensive exercise.
I don’t blame car companies for often landing on SJ600 or whatever.
Stellantis is the successor to AMC. Chrysler bought out AMC in the 1980s. Chrysler through several mergers and acquistions morphed into Stellantis, which owns Dodge today. Dodge offering a Hornet is kosher enough.
This is answer. We will never run out of car names. We will keep inventing new ones and old ones will keep getting recycled.
My dad had a Chevy S-10 Durango made in the 1980s. The Durango is now a popular Dodge model. I don’t know when Chevy stopped making a Durango but it seemed like it was only a few years before Dodge picked up the nameplate.
But they don’t have to be readable. Lots of completely unreadable names have plenty of brand recognition. NSX, M3, 911, GTI, WRX…
That’s what I meant, sorry.
I meant if you want it to be a pronouncable word, then there are many challenges. Hence why car brands often just resort to a model number.
And AMC was the successor to Hudson, which also had a car called the Hornet.
A Hudson Hornet is at least alliterative, which is nice. I like names like Toyota Tacoma or Ford Falcon for that reason.
I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that in the mid-aughts Ford decreed that all car model names must start with F (with an exception for the iconic Mustang, and I assume the Explorer didn’t get renamed because it’s technically a truck). That was supposedly why they dropped the Taurus name and replaced it with the Five Hundred. So they had an almost entirely alliterative lineup, consisting of the:
Ford Fiesta
Ford Focus
Ford Fusion
Ford Five Hundred
Ford Freestyle
Microbrewery house band name!
Interesting. Back when I first became aware of car names (mid-1960s), most Chevy models had names beginning with C: Caprice, Corvette, Camero, Corvair, Chevy II, maybe others. OK, it wasn’t complete, since there was the Impala and the Malibu, but it was close. Later on, there was the Chevette and Citation continuing the C names.
And their SUVs all began with an E - Escape, Edge, Explorer, Expedition, Excursion.
I did not know that. I thought Corolla was just made up.
I sure do. And the longest car name that is not a name is the MGB GT V8.
And for a short time Fifth Avenue was a trim level on the Chrysler New Yorker before they made it a separate model, making what was probably the longest car name that was an actual name – Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue.
Honorable mention goes to the Buick Electra Park Avenue. It was the same deal, Park Avenue was a trim level before they made it its own model.
Actually if you go by syllable count, they’re both 9 syllables. But the Chrysler has both more words and more letters.
I understand most car companies use “specialized agencies” for car names, those check that the name is:
a.) legally available/to be protected in many/all countries
b.) doesn’t have any “adverse meaning” in one of the (mayor?) markets
A quick google search said there are a little over 7000 car models that have ever existed. I don’t know if that’s true, but lets go with it.
Each alphanumeric figure you add to a car’s name increases the number of potential names by 35.
So even if you limit car names to 5 letters/numbers, that is 10^24 potential car names. We’re only at 10^3 right now.
As far as drugs, there are something like 20,000 approved pharmaceuticals. According to a study on the potentials for small molecules, there are something like 10^60 potential small molecules in the universe.
Proteins however are a different story. Each amino acid in a protein is 20 potential amino acids. Also in <100 years I’m sure we will be inventing entirely new amino acids, using the D-isomers, etc so each amino acid in a protein will have endless thousands of potential synthetic amino acids. We may reach a point where we know enough about computational chemistry that we can identity a totally novel synthetic amino acid for a protein to have a certain effect on a receptor. there are virtually endless potential synthetic amino acids. However I have no idea what harm that would do to the body, to introduce synthetic amino acids.
Even a protein of only 30 amino acids could have virtually infinite potential forms when we have thousands of synthetic amino acids.
With the now-common usage of 2-3 letters plus a digit, we’ve got a few hundred options to go (though ‘X’ seems to be required in about 30% of such cars, so that limits it a little).
Chevy used to have a car called the Nova… which apparently was a concern when marketing to Spanish-speaking countries (“No Va” supposedly meaning “does not go”).
Thoroughly debunked urban legend.
Well phooey. Opinion busted by facts yet again.