Kia Motors…will hold a survey until Oct. 25 to select the name of its new sport utility vehicle (SUV)…Anyone can vote for one of the three candidate names: “Mohave,’’ “Windriver’’ and “Opelia,’’ on a popularity poll of the firm’s Internet homepage.
“Mohave”? as in “The Mo’work, the Mo’have”? By the way, that is not simply a hapless reporter poorly transliterating “Mojave”, as in the Californian desert. On June 29, 2007 Kia Motors filed for the trademark MOHAVE (app# 34977).With such creativity, I hate to see what the new SUV will actually look like.
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Wistful Japanese carmakers are rumored to have trademarked the name ‘MoAbe’.
Well, the other ones are also quite unfortunate choices.
Windriver: who wants a car that needs to be wound or one in which you’ll wind up in a river (or the ditch) while driving?
Opelia: a rather unpleasant misspelling of the name of a character in ‘Hamlet’, Ophelia. Ironically, Hamlet gets killed (in part) for having wanted to ‘ride’ her. The name could also cause other problems for Kia. Opel is the name of a German car manufacturer owned by GM.
There’s a tendancy among Korean companies with operations elsewhere to allow the Korean brand marketers to develop product names locally and then ask their international counterparts to justify the name and develop market specific marketing materials to accompany it. I’ve wanted to pull my hair out many a time when I’ve been asked to justify an idiotic product name that was developed for use in English speaking markets by a middle aged Korean man who can do no wrong because he graduated from SNU and has a fake Master’s degree from Harvard.
# 3,
That was awsome!
Spyshots of the Kia HM or the Mesa. You know Mesa sounds a lot better than the three choices that Kia is giving to the public.
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/0.....uncovered/
Official detail shots were reported to have leaked out;
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/0.....sa-leaked/
A video of the new Kia SUV(Pandora TV, Korean)
http://channel.pandora.tv/chan.....;mode=view
You know, I now somewhat regret my titling this the way I did. As much as Rodius is a Fugly car/truck/van thingy, you got to give Ssangyong credit for a unique total package. Odd cars, odd names.
This Kia thing though… It follows in the great line of vanilla cars and odd names we have come to expect from Hyundai/Kia. The Click, the Lotze…(Give them props for the Atoz though, fugly as it is).
Many people blame the Rodius’s fugliness on Ssangyong catering too much toward Chinese tastes after being bought out by SAIC. In reality, it’s more of a Frankencar. They tried to design it to be be able to seat seven people and appeal to both “Asian” and UK tastes. While I’ll give them props for internior spaace, most people will agree that they failed miserably at achieving universal appeal.
In Japan, it appears that rejected car names are used by the soft drink industry or to name new magazines.
Ssangyong–the American Motors of Korea.
“By the way, that is not simply a hapless reporter poorly transliterating “Mojave”, as in the Californian desert.”
Mohave is a widely accepted spelling of Mojave. Mohave County in Arizona chooses that spelling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohave
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mohave
…and, besides, if Kia spelled Mohave with a ‘j’, you’d have to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining to your students, co-workers, in-laws, lovers, et. al. why the ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h’.
Spelling it M-O-H-A-V-E just saves the lot of us a glut of headaches and wasted time.
Are they gonna use Mohave name in Korea and Mesa in the U.S? Gonna admit, I like the Mesa moniker better.
Mohave…You know, that’s quite an ironic name for a gas guzzler.
Mojave - Mohave, Westin - Western …
In case anybody is interested I looked into the “Why not Mesa?” thing on my blog since it was IP worth in the end.
http://dramman.blogspot.com/20.....atter.html