Car Crazy

Mallory’s assignment for English 100 is to write a short paper about the names we choose for a class of things, such as cars, perfume, or breakfast cereal, and discuss what these metaphors reveal about our culture. Because she had spent half an hour that morning in a traffic jam stuck behind a Stealth and because her best friend had been rear-ended by a Mirage the week before, she decided to look into the names of cars.

She starts out with Yahoo!, an all-purpose subject directory. Since cars are not an obscure academic topic, she doesn’t need to use a more thorough search engine at this point. On the Yahoo! home page www.yahoo.com, she clicks on Autos under the Recreation & Sports heading. That takes her to http://dir.yahoo.com/Recreation/Automotive/, where she finds this list.

As she reads down the list, she thinks of a number of possible topics.

• Alternative Fuel Vehicles: How do their names compare with the names of gasoline-powered cars?
• British Cars: How do their names compare with the names of American cars? and Japanese cars? Do those names tell us anything about differences in the three cultures?
• Classic Cars: How do their names compare with the names of cars today?
• Car Art
• Concept Cars: What do their names say about them (or are they just named with numbers)?
• History: See Classic Cars question.
• Makes and Models: What does the model name tell us about the demographic group that the car company is targeting? How do the ads for the different models reflect the metaphor of the model’s name?
• Recreational Vehicles/Sport Utility Vehicles/Station Wagons/Trucks: What do the models have in common? How do they differ? Who are the intended purchasers?

Before she starts clicking on links, she notes the number of pages listed for each link. She gulps when she sees that there are over 2,000 pages for Makes and Models. If she wants to compare names of current models, she’s going to have to find a way to limit the search. She decides to take a quick look first at the eight links that caught her eye (listed above).

She starts with Alternative Fuel Vehicles.

Since she’s not sure whether alternative fuel vehicles are far enough along to have model names (other than series of letters and numbers), she decides to sample a few of the pages listed rather than explore the subdirectories. Daimler-Chrysler’s page is extremely slow to download, and the summary of the site indicates that its model is known only by an acronym (NECAR)—not worth the time to explore. Clean Car Road Race is someone’s dream but not a reality—no models of cars listed. Kushan’s Page of Electric and Solar Powered Cars is another that takes an age to download, so Mallory does a quick Back click. One last try:  Web Directory: Alternative Fuel-vehicle Directory seems only to be links to information about various kinds of vehicle energy sources. So Mallory crosses Alternative Fuel Vehicles off her list.

Next, on to British Cars. Among the pages listed is British Car Web. On that page, she finds a link to British Car Marque Web Servers at http://www.team.net/sol/solwebs.html. She vaguely remembers that "marque" is a British word for "brand" or "model" and decides to check out the page. Sure enough, it contains links to a whole list of companies—with evocative names like Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Cobra, and Lotus. The comparison of British and American car names may be interesting, so she bookmarks the page.

Boredom is setting in, so she does a quick survey of the SUV listings, and comes up with a Popular Science magazine article comparing SUVs, and finds a page listing all their names. That’s the basic information she needs if SUVs are going to be part of her comparison, so she prints out the page and bookmarks it in case she wants to come back later.

http://www.popsci.com/automotive/suv/fullisting.html

In fact, she decides she could do her paper comparing the names of the different types of SUVs and what they say about who their target audiences are. The small SUVs have names like Tracker, Wrangler, and Forester—all rugged individuals and outdoorsmen from earlier eras. Midsize names include Jimmy, Rodeo, Sport—friendly names to appeal to the whole family. The names of the SUVs in the next larger size put the emphasis on bigness: Tahoe, Yukon, Land Cruiser. The luxury SUVs (a curious concept) that don’t use a code of letters and number (SLX, ML320) have fancy names like Navigator and Bravada. As for the "specialists"—with a Hummer or an Outback, you’re ready for any terrain.

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