Norman: I’m Dutch, but my best guess for an English translation for your BX’s name would be Shitbox. Am I anywhere near?
Personally, I think naming cars is a bit silly. Well, I can imagine it for a very old car that has been with you for ages, but for relatively new cars? Come on, no matter how much I love cars and driving, they are still nothin gmore than means of transportation.
Some of the names here were rather funny though. Maybe I’ll reconsider
A friend of mine has a Peugeot 205. It is named “Jean-Luc”. Yup, a Trekkie.
We had a station wagon for 8 years, an Olds, we called it our Herbie car, after the movie. My son misses it.We now have two saturns, so they are just big car and small car.
“Skod” in itself means cigarette butt, but is also added as a prefix to anything that falls way below expectations. “Öse” is specifically slang for a rotten car. And that about sums up my experiences with that particular vehicle - a substandard rotten car.
And even for a Danish word, “skodöse” is a truly ugly sound.
'64 Dodge pickup (with the slant six engine like my brother Tommy’s Dodge Dart) - lambcharger
'78 VW Rabbit - Conejito (Spanish for little rabbit) but a friend suggested Alice since it was white.
'82 Suzuki Katana 550 - road rash
'66 VW bug - Midnite Cruiser (from the Steely Dan song)
'78 Scirocco and '85 Buick Regal - *&^%ing piece of %^*
'90 BMW 325i - Osito (little bear as in The Three Bears as in this one’s just right)
current Dodge truck - haven’t decided, open to suggestion. “Gas sucking pig” doesn’t have much of a ring to it.
AWB - Did you get hassenpfeffer from Poor Richard’s Rabbit Book or from the Bugs Bunny and Yosimete Sam cartoon?
And it almost slipped my mind. For a brief time in the summer of of '86 I drove my grandma’s '75 Ford LTD. That boat was christened the Exxon Valdiz II.
When I was a kid, my mother drove a 1979 Chevy Nova. The big kind. It was powder blue, to boot. Around 1987-88, this thing became known as “The Shakemobile” because of the rapid side to side motion it produced while moving forward. A few years later it was donated to a somewhat destitute teenage relation. It promptly began spewing powder blue smoke from the exhaust. It’s name then became “The Smokin’ Blue Bomb”. In 1992 it died a painful death in a ditch.
My Father and his wife had an Oldsmobile that was the ‘spare’ car. I called it “The Vacation Car”.
My own cars have had names, too, but nothing spectacular:
red 87 Dodge Shadow was Jet;
the maroon 92 Honda Civic was Big Al;
and the green 95 Toyota doesn’t have a name but I call it Mummy’s Precious Darling.
1962 Chrysler Newport with bad belts – (Screaming) Mimi
1973 AMC Gremlin (yes, I had one) – Great Green Gremlin
After that I had a whole string of cars that didn’t really deserve to be personalized. Then I got my '95 Taurus, which I love. As a tribute to my father, I named it after the only car he ever said he loved – Studebaker.
When I was a kid there was an old Cessna 150 at Montgomery Field in San Diego. I don’t remember the registration, but the last three characters were “2-8-Tango”. People called it “Shaky Jake”.
My sister had a 60-something powder blue Chevy wagon. She called it “Sheldon”. My dad and I (the bratty little brother) called it “Smedley” after the Elephant character in Peanutbutter Crunch Cap’n Crunch cereal.
'62 Rambler Station wagon that looked like it had been rolled a couple of times and got 42 miles to a gallon of gas and a quart of oil --The Tub
'66 Rambler station wagon, was originally white top over green body, but had the hood replaced with a blue one, one door replaced with a red one and the tailgate replaced with a yellow one
–The melting pot.
'74 Gremlin was Grendel
'67 red Alpha Romeo Spider Veloce – Hair Tangler.
'79 VW Rabbit – Tow Bait (it lasted 21000 miles and was towed in 4 times.)
“You can be smart or pleasant. For years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.”
Elwood P. Dowd
Back in school lo these many years ago, I had a 1984 Honda Accord that spent most of its time in the shop. I named it “Bob”, after Atlanta Brave 3B Bob Horner, who spent most of his playing career on the disabled list. I even taped a baseball card of Horner to the dashboard.
Way back in high school, my brother had a reconditioned post office Jeep that he called “the Mail Heap.”
In college, I had a '74 thunderbird, white with maroon interior. I called it “Moby” and even browbeat my GF into giving me her SOS-pad holder, which was a white ceramic whale with open mouth, and glued it to the dashboard as a change dish. It had a bad steering column - the tilt-a-wheel wouldn’t lock in one position and just flopped around - and the ignition system had a short that worsened to the point that one day I turned it off, removed the key, AND IT KEPT RUNNING. Had to pull a spark-plug wire to kill the undead beast.
My current car is a '95 Crown Victoria (I’m the envy of all the senior citizens in my neighborhood :)). It’s green, so I’m leaning toward “The Green Hornet,” but I’m holding off naming it until the plates arrive, so I can see if the letters suggest another name.
