Again, Stranger Than Fiction

Over the years, we’ve all heard the urban legends about companies giving products unintentional – and hilarious – names, either by poor translations from one language into another, or else by virtue of extremely poor decision-making. Some of these aren’t actually true – the Chevy Nova was marketed in Spanish-speaking countries, but no one there ever thought that the name was a blunder; “no va” does literally mean “won’t go” in Spanish, but everyone knows what a nova is, and no one confused the names. Others are, however – the AMC Gremlin was actually named for a minor problem or malfunction that defies repeated efforts to fix it, and there is no way to dispute the fact that Dodge really did market a car called the “Swinger” and Daihatsu attempted to market one called the “Charade.” Until a new Audi product was released to the press last week, however, I don’t believe we had ever seen a car named after a human waste product before, however…

You can pick up the story from the Green Car Reports site if you want to, but the story appears to be legitimate. Audi has introduced a new concept car which they have named the e-Tron. It’s an obvious take on iPhone and similarly-configured product names that have appeared over the past few years. The difficulty is that in French, etron is a word – a word that means, literally, excrement. Even worse, the e-Tron isn’t just a single model, it’s Audi’s name for the entire line of hybrid and electric-powered vehicles; they are apparently planning to bring out various different e-Tron models in different sizes, styles and capabilities. Which means that most western countries, presumably including France, will soon be inundated with ads for a product whose name means, literally, dung…

Now, I realize that Audi is a German firm, not a French company, and apparently e-Tron doesn’t mean anything untoward in German; it may not mean anything at all. The question still remains as to why no one even considered that the name might have another meaning in a country which literally shares a border with the one in which Audi is based. Granted that Mazda really did attempt to market a vehicle called the La Puta in several Spanish-speaking countries (it’s a rather rude slang term for a prostitute), and Nissan attempted to sell a car called the Moco (it means “booger” in Spanish, which isn’t actually obscene, but is still not a good name for something you want people to take seriously) in many of the same venues, but both of these cases involve slang terms from languages not spoken within 5,000 miles of Japan, not a language spoken in a literally adjacent country – and neither of them translates into something literally unprintable…

It has been said that it’s almost impossible to find a name for a new product that isn’t already either in use somewhere else in the world or obscene in some other language, and this may be the case that proves the assumption once and for all. There’s probably nothing you can do about the fact that your new product name means “foot fungus” in Swahili, or that your new car project designation mean “over-priced death-trap” in one of the three thousand or so dialects spoken in central Asia, but it’s hard to imagine not at least checking out all of the few dozen languages spoken in your primary market – which for Audi does, legitimately, include the European Union and North America…

Unless, of course, this is all a very clever attempt to gain free publicity by causing an International buzz about a product-naming failure and getting thousands of bloggers and other ‘net denizens to spread word for free. In which case, the strategy appears to be working perfectly – but the events we’re observing are still stranger than fiction…