From the archives of Bob Montgomery
CAR NAMES AND NICKNAMES: While the products of many car manufacturers are named after their founder, others have a more unique derivation, while the origin of others is nothing short of bizarre.
Most people with an interest in cars will be aware that Cannstatt Daimler named its cars Mercedes by taking the name from that of Mercedes Jellinek, the daughter of a director of the company, Emile Jellinek. But very few are aware that the Austrian branch of the company later used the name of her sister, Maja, in similar fashion.
One of the strangest names of all, yet in its own way typically American, is that of "Rigs that Run". This was used by an obscure St Louis manufacturer in the early 1900s to differentiate their cars from other "rigs" which presumably didn't run very well, if at all.
Another American manufacturer, the Reeves Manufacturing Company of America, called their product the "Sex-Auto". This was apparently on account of the fact that it had six wheels rather than for any more exotic reason. The "Sex-Auto" survived for a few years but the company didn't long survive the launch of its replacement, the "Octo-Auto" in 1911, with, yes, you've guessed, eight wheels.
Sometimes the marketing men had their say as in the case of the "Iris" cars produced by Legros and Knowles of Willesden, England in 1905. Sometime afterwards a nameless marketing man used the name to form the slogan, "It runs in silence", (which was apparently far from the truth). However, the slogan worked and caught on with the car-buying public although it failed to save Iris from the same fate as the majority of car manufacturers of the period.
"Tac-Tac", long before it became a mint, was a make of cycle car manufactured by Dumoulin in Paris in 1924 while the "Pic-Pic" was a model produced by the Swiss Picard-Pictet firm between 1920 and 1925. Another oddly named Swiss car was the "Yaxa", which was apparently derived from y'a qu ça - a corruption of il n'y a que cela meaning "It's the one and only".
Several early car names had literary allusions, and the name "Lion-Peugeot" was given to an offshoot of the firm set up by Robert Peugeot in 1908. Their racing rivals, Corre, took the name "Core-La-Licorne", so that the battles of mythology between the Lion and the Unicorn were fought all over again in the Coupe de l'Auto light car races.
Not surprisingly, many cars acquired nicknames and nowhere was this more so than in Britain where any foreign make was liable to acquire such a nickname from mechanics and chauffeurs. Such names have a habit of sticking and so it was in the case of that most popular of early cars, the De Dion, which became the "Ding-Dong". The Belgian Metallurgique soon became the "Metally-jerk" and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Vinot et Deguingand became the "Veeno", and later simply the "Eno".
The Spanish Hispano-Suiza firm was encouraged by Spain's young King Alfonso XIII, who was such an enthusiastic and skillful motorist that they named one of their most famous pre-1914 sporting cars the "Alfonso-Hispano" in his honour. Quite what he would have thought if he had known that all Hispano-Suiza cars would come to be known by the nickname of "Banana Squeezer" is not recorded.
Finally, there was the Isotta-Fraschim which became known as the "I-Shot-a-Flash-Sheeny" and the Begot-Mazurie which claims the last word on this subject as the "Bag o' Misery"!