What’s in a name?
Nissan Tiida
Nissan is happily shooting itself in the foot again. Why?
Because it refuses to see that it is not doing well in the
‘name game’. I refer to its latest offering to the world in
the small/medium car stakes, a thing which they have called
the Tee Double I Dee Ay, written as Tiida and pronounced
“Teeda”. I am sure it means something wonderful in Japan,
but the English speaking world is very wary of buying
something they cannot recognize, let alone pronounce. It has
been for sale in Australia for a few months and the
showrooms are hardly full to bursting with prospects. The
community apathy is such that their local marketing people
are trying to get across the message that it is the
replacement for the old Pulsar, a name that people did
relate to. In Thailand, the Tiida appellation might have
more of a success as apparently Tida (single “I”) is a very
polite word for ‘daughter’ in the upper levels of society.
However, we shall see.
Nissan has had some dreadful names in the past, take for
example their ‘luxury’ car which they called the Cedric.
With apologies to all those people who have had the
misfortune to be christened Cedric by their parents, who
obviously exhibited latent psychopathic traits, who is going
to proudly buy a car called a Cedric? “Come and look at my
new Cedric!” You have got to be joking! It is actually in
Nissan’s favor, I suppose, that they didn’t call the next
one the Cecil!
Mind you, Nissan is not the only company to pick some
dreadful names. Remember the Cressida from Toyota? Actually
this was quite a good car, but the name! It didn’t sell
because Toyota got the name game wrong.
Slick and
Small is the way to Haul
The above title used to be the slogan of
a magazine called Fast Fours and Rotaries, dedicated to
small performance cars, usually owned by impecunious young
drivers. And we’ve all been there!
However, “slick and small” is becoming the province of all
drivers these days, as the fuel prices continue to rise ($74
per barrel as I write this, and it will be $100 by the end
of the year, says my crystal ball). The end result is such
that the automakers who will do well have some slick and
smalls for sale. The companies that will not do so well are
those who are still thinking large capacity engines, and if
you put your effort behind large SUVs, you will have a
problem.
Take the current situation in the US, the world’s greatest
consumer of motor vehicles. GM experienced a 12 percent drop
in sales in May, compared to May last year. DaimlerChrysler
was down 11 percent (SUVs down 14 percent) and FoMoCo down 2
percent (and their SUVs down 21 percent). Now look at Toyota
and Honda. Toyota up 17 percent (with their car sales side
up 25 percent) and Honda up 16 percent (and car sales up 21
percent). Spearheading the increased sales were the Toyota
Yaris (called a sub-compact in the US) and the Honda Fit
(called Jazz in Thailand).
The trend is obvious – truck (pick-ups) and SUVs down, while
the small cars are on the increase. GM are trying to say
that their cars are the most fuel-efficient, but the public
are not buying that line. It is how many liters per week
that you have to buy that counts. A small (less than 1.5
liter) engine uses less fuel than a 3 liter, no matter how
fuel efficient the larger engine might be.
Autotrivia Quiz
Last week I asked what new car sold 100,000 units in the
first 100 days of its release? It was the original Ford
Mustang, and they are still great looking cars, especially
the 7 liter engined models, and even today that model has
great supercar performance.
So to this week. The famous Monza banked autodrome was
rebuilt in 1955 for a special race. What was it? And who won
it?
For the Automania FREE beer this week, be the first correct
answer to email [email protected]
Good luck!
The incestuous nature
of the automobile industry
Nash
Metropolitan
Incest in the automotive industry has
been on for years, right back to Detroit, and Ransom E.
Olds, the first auto manufacturer there, in 1896.
Ransom E. was a bit of a character, but was building cars of
his own design in Detroit, and called them Oldsmobiles. They
sold well until a fire in March 1901 destroyed 10 of the 11
models on offer, leaving only one called the “Curved Dash
Olds”, and the term “Fire Sale” was born.
Ransom wasn’t going to be held to ransom by fires,
deliberate or otherwise and ramped up production of the
Curved Dash vehicle, but the orders came in so fast he
turned to others in the auto industry for help.
One of these was Henry M. Leland, who agreed to build
engines for Olds. Keep the name Leland in mind (nothing
whatsoever to do with the British Leyland debacle, I hasten
to add). He will crop up again.
Now having a good supplier for his engines, Olds then
ordered 2,000 transmissions from another machine shop owned
by John and Horace Dodge. However, our John and Horace also
went on to build engines, transmissions and axles for Henry
Ford, who was also assembling cars in Detroit.
But back to Henry Leland. Henry improved the Olds engine,
but Ransom wasn’t impressed at the work done by his
supplier. Leland, however, believed it was a good engine and
took the design to the board of Henry Ford. The directors
liked Leland’s engine and decided to produce a car with
Leland’s more powerful “Olds” motor. Leland suggested that
this new car should be named after the French explorer who
founded Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. So then cars
appeared on the streets of Detroit, with a modified
Oldsmobile engine up front, but called a Cadillac!
William C. Durant was another of the big players. A
millionaire in the horse-drawn carriage business he met a
chap by the name of David Dunbar Buick, who had made a
fortune in the plumbing business, who was tinkering with
cars, and like Ransom E. Olds called them after himself.
Buick did not last long, selling out in 1903 to Benjamin and
Frank Briscoe, who then on-sold it to J.H. Whiting, owner of
the Flint Wagon Works. Whiting convinced Durant to drive the
Buick car, which featured a valve-in-head engine. Durant
liked it and promptly bought the company and reorganized it
in 1904.
By 1908 Durant had formed General Motors, acquiring
Oldsmobile and Oakland (later Pontiac), plus some supplier
firms. He already had Buick, and Chevrolet was next. In the
meantime he made Charles Nash, a young associate in the
carriage business, president of GM. Name ring a bell? What
about the Nash Metropolitan? More on Nash later.
Durant was a wheeler-dealer but some of his schemes were not
profitable, and he was asked to leave GM. However, Durant
had hooked up with Louis Chevrolet. Louis Chevrolet, who was
a brilliant engineer, soon fell out with Durant and walked
away from his own car company in a Gallic temper, leaving it
with Durant who then ended up back with GM, bringing in
Chevrolet!
Meanwhile, Henry Leland sold his Cadillac cars to the
General Motors conglomerate, and after serving as an
executive in GM, Henry went off and formed a company to
build aero engines. This was called Lincoln Motor Company,
but in 1920 began to build cars. The Lincoln became a
competitor to the Cadillac, and eventually Henry Leland sold
the Lincoln Car Company to Ford Motor Company. So one of
Detroit’s favorite sons builds two quality cars, one of
which he sells to GM and the other to Ford! With Durant back
in GM, he fired Nash, who went off on his own, took over an
ailing manufacturer to build his own cars, which he modestly
named after himself. This company went on to become
Nash-Kelvinator and in 1954 merged with Hudson to form
American Motors. American Motors were in turn swallowed up
by the Chrysler Corporation in 1987.
Chrysler! Yes, there’s another name in the incest stakes.
Walter P. Chrysler was in charge of the Buick nameplate at
GM while Nash was president, but soon fell out with the
abrasive Durant. Walt took a job to manage the financially
troubled Willys-Overland. Chrysler revamped Willys, bringing
in an engineer called Fred Zeder, who had been with
Studebaker.
Walter P. got Willys back on its wheels and was so
successful at it that he was asked to steer the Maxwell
company out of trouble. Maxwell cars went back to the early
days of Ransom E. Olds, and Jonathan Maxwell was an
associate of Benjamin Briscoe, who had at one time bought
and sold the Buick Company. (Your head spinning yet? It
should be!)
Crafty old Walt began building a new (Maxwell) car using an
engine designed by Studebaker’s Zeder. Several models of the
Maxwell with the Zeder engine were shipped to New York for
the 1924 auto show called “Chryslers”. Later that year, the
company was reorganized into the Chrysler Corporation,
selling cars that had connections to Buick, Maxwell, and
Studebaker.
It doesn’t end there. Remember the dodgy Dodge brothers? The
brothers both died in 1920, but the grieving widows felt
that the name should continue. The women asked Frederick
Haynes, manager of the Dodge plant, to run the company.
Under Haynes, the Dodge Brothers Motor Car company continued
to grow and acquired Graham Truck in 1925, which became
called Dodge Truck. So the brothers, Joseph, Robert and Ray
Graham worked for Dodge, but then left to build the
Graham-Paige car. Which perhaps could have been called a
Graham-Dodge-Paige?
Dodge Brothers did well and in 1925 was sold to a banking
conglomerate for USD 146 million. The widows had done well.
But so did the bankers, who three years later sold Dodge for
USD 170 million. And who bought it? The Chrysler corporation
of course! And what happened after that? The German
connection, but that is for another day.
Cadillac
