Why Every Cool Car Had a Nickname
The Citroën 2CV was known as the “Tin Snail.” Image by Milan Bauer from Pixabay
A factory gives a car a model name. The owner gives it a personality. Somewhere along the way, the public sometimes gives it a nickname, and that’s when a machine starts to live beyond its spec sheet.
Some names stick to famous cars because of a movie or a television show. Others develop in workshops, paddocks and parking lots. The interesting ones rarely sound like something approved in a marketing meeting. They come from a shape, a color, a reputation or a story.
“General Lee” — the orange Dodge Charger from the show The Dukes of Hazzard
A Name You Have to Earn
A nickname can turn a car into a character. “The Bandit” immediately summons a black Trans Am. “General Lee” summons an orange Dodge Charger sailing sideways over a creek bed in Hazzard County, number 01 on the doors, horn playing a tune the whole town could hum.
Nobody at Dodge named that car. A television show did, and The Dukes of Hazzard turned a 1969 Charger into the best-known orange car in America. It ran on TV from 1979 to 1985, and the car outlasted the plot lines. It also carries complicated history. The name and the roof flag are why Warner Bros. stopped licensing the flag version in 2015, and why owners still argue over how to treat the car today. A famous nickname can hold a lot of baggage, and the story is better told with that included.
The same thing happens on a smaller scale. A project car becomes known among friends for the one mechanical problem nobody can permanently solve. The name is a shortcut to the story.
It’s tempting to make a grand theory of this, but the truth is simpler. People name things they care about. Sailors do it with boats. Drivers do it with trucks. Mechanics do it with the machine that keeps coming back for the same repair.
Burt Reynolds in “The Bandit” car in the film “Smokey and the Bandits”
Not Every Name Needs to Be Cool
The best nicknames are sometimes affectionate insults. A battered daily driver can have more personality than a flawless show car with its name printed on a display board. A joke that survives five years of ownership says something about the relationship between the driver and the machine.
We like cars with stories more than cars with slogans. So tell us: what do you call yours, and how did it get the name? The embarrassing answers are probably the good ones.