What is true is the mandatory name change for the Mitsubishi Pajero in (all? ) of the spanish speaking world… Here it became the Montero.
Cars is nothing. There are over 2 million named living species, with many more probably yet to be named.
Sure, but there’s massive duplication of names in taxonomy - think of how many plants have ‘sativa’ or ‘officinalis’ or ‘campestris’ as their species identifier.
The Land Rover Range Rover Evoque enters the chat. Shorter, but wait until the Mk II.
Probably correct. The Internet Movie Car Database lists 5965 models.
[aside]
This one may be a retconned folk etymology — years later when the cars began displaying typical GM quality, sure, a bunch of us started saying it meant that. But by then millions had been succesfully sold.
Plus the phonetics are wrong — in Spanish “nova” is stressed on the O and “no va” is equally stressed (besides the pause in the middle).
[/aside]
I think Volkswagen has demonstrated the ability to name models in unexpected ways. Tiguan is a German portmanteau (hard to imagine running scarce on those) while Touareg is a variant spelling of a N. African tribe. Both of course are easy for Americans to pronounce at a glance!
And if you are diving into words from African tribes, maybe someday you’ll land on a click language and the fun begins.