Long before one of their new models hits the showrooms, motorcar manufacturers have to find a name by which they hope their latest offering will be known and loved. Some content themselves with a mixture of letters and numbers, and indeed many customers can extract the entire pedigree of a machine from 2.3 GLSpi or some similarly cryptic combination. But others are more tempted by a name with a romantic ring - one which is presumed to reflect in some special way the desirable qualities of the vehicle in question.
The answer, sometimes, is blowing in the wind. There are local winds which appear regularly enough in various parts of the world to merit a special name of their own, and Maserati is particularly fond of them. One of its models, for example, recalls the chilling ruthlessness of the mistral, a cold and fierce ravine wind which blows at a great speed down the Rhone Valley of southern France; the Maserati Mistral is a two-seater sports model with a six-cylinder four-litre engine, which began production in 1964.
Another marque, the Maserati Bora, commemorates the volatile and unpredictable bora, the squally, stormy wind, much feared by yachtsmen, which descends from the barren slopes of the Dalmatian and Albanian mountains westwards into the Adriatic Sea.
The pleasures of Arabian nights seem to be promised by the Maserati Khasmin and the Maserati Ghibli. For meteorologists, the connotations are less pleasant; the khasmin and the ghibli are scorching, hot, desert winds, which blow northwards from the Sahara over Egypt and Libya.
And the Maserati Shamal, introduced in 1992, is named after the hot, monotonous and enervating wind that blows from Iraq south-eastwards to the Persian Gulf.
The khasmin and the ghibli are both particular cases of the more generic term, sirocco wind, a name which was used some years ago by Volkswagen. There is also a VW Passat - which is the German word for "trade wind" - and a Santana, which presumably was inspired by the Santa Ana, a hot dry wind which blows down seawards from the Coast Ranges in southern California. Volkswagen continued their windy theme with the Jetta, the Vento and the Corrado, and seem to have to borrowed from Maserati for their Bora.
And how many of you remember the old Ford Zephyr? Here were no mysterious adventures in the desert or nasty squalls descending from a mountain; the emphasis was on the solid, comfortable and dependable zephyros - the gentle west wind of the ancient Greeks.