Introducing the Kia Terrorist

Kia concept car 'Provo' reminds Irish of terror:

"Lawmakers from Northern Ireland formally appealed Tuesday for the South Korean carmaker to junk the name of its planned super-mini sports coupe because "Provo" is the nickname for the dominant branch of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, the Provisional IRA."

Looks great in orange. Can't wait to check out the Toyota Blackentan and Hyundai Sectarian at next year's Detroit Auto Show.

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UnderachievingSheep

The Mitsubishi Pajero still beats the Provo. At least, it would beat the Provo if there was a ranking of poorly thought car names.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  The Toyota Previa was a big hit in the OB community.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CHSSLIBJKD2WK4JWHWATQDNAWI D
  
  The beatings that the Pajero hands off have nothing to do with competition.
http://profile.yahoo.com/65CSAR3QATRNKJW4NYNB2BESZE JohnQPublic

They’re not going to like the way we call our retirement funds here either
nixiebunny

Naming cars after cities is silly. I should know; I live in a city with a car named after it.
saint_al

Because butthurt stings. Car companies usually try very hard to select names that don’t mean a damned thing in any language. There’s no definition for “Celica” except a Toyota model.
- aalien
  
  But it still dangerously close to Russian colloquial word for a virgin.
Jellodyne

You’d never see that sweet Sally Ann Cavanaugh driving something flashy like that.
http://twitter.com/nagmay Gabriel Nagmay

Not as funny as the Honda Fit:

“Honda originally intended to name the car “Fitta”, but shortened the name in some markets, and renamed it completely in others, upon discovering that in several Nordic languages, fitta is a popular and vulgar slang word for female genitalia”

wikipedia via The Oatmeal
- EH
  
  Seeing how every other Honda has a model name that is an actual word, I’m gonna call shenanigans.
  - Jellodyne
    
    Also Honda calls the car the Jazz in a lot of markets, speaking of Utah.
  - https://www.facebook.com/rgovrebo B. Peasant
    
    No shenanigans. It happened.
- http://www.nothinginside.net mindysan33
  
  I don’t know if that is true… but I want it to be true. It would make my new car more interesting!
- Jens Reuterberg
  
  As a sidenote the word “fitta” although meaning c*nt now in Swedish usually ment “wet woodland meadow” a few hundred years ago.
http://www.lightning-rose.com/ LightningRose

Nice looking car in the photos, but nothing to show me how it will look in my rear view mirror as it recedes in the distance.
http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/ pduggie

They’re a bit sensitive You also can’t call things Black and Tan. And that has sensitivities of black racial experience too. Its a twofer.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  Unlike American terrorism, Northern Irish terrorism isn’t just a one-off event – it’s more than just a slogan.
  - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
    
    The Irish are a bit fiesty; but if I were a South Korean, living within spitting distance of a dubiously balanced dude with awesome hair, lots of artillery, a zillion zerg conscripts, and apparently nukes, I think I’d be inclined to tell the protesting politicians to quit their whining and go get some real neighbor problems…
    - Gilbert Wham
      
      ’A bit feisty’? No. Just… no.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      The Troubles:
      Civilians killed: 1,842
      Total dead: 3,529
      Total injured: 47,541+
      - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
        
        So maybe .1% the size of the toll of the Korean togetherness deficiencies?
    - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
      
      Actually my point was more that if Kia were releasing a new car in the US called the Taliban I think there’d be a bit of a stink kicked up about it – and in impact terms that’s terrorism-light.
      
      I don’t think we need to move to a model where only the worlds worse off are allowed to grumble about things – that’s just silly.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  They’re a bit sensitive
  
  I look forward to the Dodge TwinTowers s911.
  - UnderachievingSheep
    
    oh god no. Imagine the conspiracy theories spin offs we would have to endure.
  - Finnagain
    
    Dodge Twin Turbo Towers911!1!
  - McGreens
    
    Porsche got in there waaaay earlier.
RadioSilence

I remember being told that Toyota had to change the name of the MR2 in france as ‘emme erre deux’ sounds pretty close to ‘merde’. But this was in the days before google when we could instantly check up on any amazing ‘fact’.

Don’t companies that sell stuff in markets with many langages have a department, or employ an agency, to find out if potential names are offensive anywhere in the world?
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Famously (well, for relative values of famous), the PR bods for our then polytechnic, during the period when we got rid of polytechnics and made them all into crap-sounding universities, wanted to call it City University of Newcastle-uopn-Tyne. It got a fair way upstairs approval-wise before someone said, ‘Er, hang on…’
  - RadioSilence
    
    Yeah, I’ve heard that one. And Scottish Highlands and Islands Television, too :)
  - -hms-
    
    I work at the City University of New York, and darn it if the “T” and “Y” aren’t damn close together for my buttery little typers. Luckily I’ve yet to shoot off an email discussing anything but operations at CUNY
    - Chris Hogan
      
      The irony being “cunny” is itself a diminutive form of “c*nt”. (as used in, for example, HBO’s Rome)
  - http://www.raines.com/ raines
    
    for similar reasons (many suspect), what might otherwise be the First Unitarian Church of Kensington is known as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley.
- -hms-
  
  As a web app developer, I’ve long thought it would be great to create a phonetic “baby name” tester that you would type potential names into, and it would warn you of any similar sounding common word in other languages.
  
  Instead, I just comment on blogs.
  - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
    
    That would be a useful tool. *adds to to-do list*
  - aalien
    
    But it still won’t help with family names. I have a friend, Tim Fokin, for example. And it pronounced just luke you expect it would… in Russian.
- http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
  
  I was told that this was the reason they changed “Esso” to “Exxon,” but further research suggests that was bullshit. In fact, they kept using the “Esso” name overseas.
- peregrinus
  
  MR2 in french sounds just like “merdeux”, which simply means crappy.
  
  Companies do have marketing people who have long lists of things to do, but by the time you’ve committed $$$ beyond belief and gone over the budget waterfall 10 times, the CEO, investors and shareholders have a gun to your head shouting ‘just sell the fucking thing!’
  
  The marketing, although substantial in money terms, comes waaaay after the R&D, allocation of production facilities, decisions about optimal tax break structuring (e.g. which city gets production – Raleigh NC? Dagenham England? etc), preparation of the workforce etc.
  
  All that said – paradoxically, although the name is such a major factor to consumers, they seem to pay less attention to it and all the other stuff, because money-wise it just doesn’t seem to matter.
  
  Until d’oh! Another famous car-name fudge-up!
  
  We see it more with cars than anything else because they’re about the most expensive mass-selling consumer item there is.
  
  My favourite was always the Nova (Opel / GM (?) / Vauxhall). It didn’t go down so well in hispanic markets.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    And in the shoe department, the Reebok Incubus for women. 18,000 pairs of shoes at $57.99 a pair recalled.
    - peregrinus
      
      Ha! Very Orlando Bloom’s Späsmotica!
      
      I could do this all day, it’s so amusing - http://www.nfrontier.co.uk/blog/disastrous-international-marketing-failures-and-how-to-avoid-them/
      
      Incubus. Wow.
- http://www.lightning-rose.com/ LightningRose
  
  MR2 can arguably be translated as “Nissan”.
  
  In Japanese, 2 is “ni” (pronounced as the Knights Who Say Ni). Reading MR as mister, it translates as the honorific “san”, which follows the proper name.
  
  Therefore, “Mister Two” translates as “ni san”.
  - RadioSilence
    
    That’s tremendous! :)
http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns

Reminder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo,_Utah
GawainLavers

Chevrolet No Va…
http://blog.insightvr.com John Harrison

Please tell me they’re going to release this in BYU’s colors.
nem0fazer

I seem to remember a similar problem in that neck of the woods with an advertising campaign with the company slogan “the future’s bright, the future’s orange”
http://profile.yahoo.com/BOV56XV5A5ZYIAPB3PZHMCZBHY steve

I’m old enough to remember KIA was “killed in action” during the vietnam era.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That was a big PR problem for the car company when it started. That and the fact that their cars were described as being two decades behind the industry in safety and comfort features.
  - http://blacknell.net/dynamic/ MB
    
    No it wasn’t.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Yes, it was. I remember reading about it in the papers.
      
      Also, I know you are but what am I?
Finnagain

Given that “Kia says it has no plans to bring the Provo to life.”, why do the Irish give a shit? If they had just ignored it, I would never have heard of the non-thing.
- fuzzyfuzzyfungus
  
  Taking symbolic offense at irrelevant things ranks right up there with being in favor of ‘the children’ on the scale of political safety…
Donald Petersen

Rob, you missed your calling. Sometimes I wonder how some weird model names get chosen. Kia always had some odd ones. Wikipedia tells me that the Sephia was an acronym for Style Elegant Powerful Hi-tech Ideal Auto, which is as random a collection of vaguely positive automotive terms as one could hope to splash on a Scrabble board. I don’t know what kind of consumer finds names like Elantra or Galant or Camry or Scoupe or RAV4 appealing, but I’d put down a deposit for a Hyundai Sectarian right now.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=667331606 P. Orbis Proszynski

This is stupid. Provo != Terrorists. Provo = Mormons. Clearly Utah should have sued those pesky Irishmen back when they started the Provisional IRA, or maybe the papers when they shortened the name, if it wasn’t IRA-approved.
- Martijn Vos
  
  Provo was a Dutch counter movement protest thingie from the ’60s. They has a lot of weird funny bizarre proposals that 30 years later some cities actually started to implement.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=530375849 Pete Ward

In orange … *golf clap*
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1068169757 Cris Overlord

and Saxony attempted to get Cadillac to change the name of the “ESCALADE” because it brought up to many unpleasant memories of Normans with long ladders.
Mark Gilbert

Volkswagon have a Touareg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Touareg which I presume is their way of helping to fund Malian rebels fighting against the French.
I’m sure some people would consider the Touareg ‘terrorists’.
- Petzl
  
  I don’t know what VW was thinking.
  Touareg has got to be the inherently ugliest name for a car since Edsel.
- toyg
  
  Apart from the obvious fact that the VW Touareg was introduced when Lybia was still under Gaddafi, people worried about actual Tuaregs are not VW’s target market. Their market is middle-class Europeans for whom “Touareg” is a synonym for “expensive holidaysin exotic places where white people are still colonial rulers”… of National Geographic pics with fiery moustached men who’d drag a powerful but repressed nordic woman to their tent and make wild love to her until the day rises again… of images of rugged warlords dominating unruly tribes like a white nordic male dominates his office underlings… and of course, of big cars that can go through the desert without breaking a sweat, so they’ll fend off suburban traffic in style.
  
  I personally don’t see anything wrong with the name, from a marketing perspective. Unfortunately, the car is just another ego-stroking SUV that should probably be banned like the rest of them.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    fiery moustached men who’d drag a powerful but repressed nordic woman to
    their tent and make wild love to her until the day rises again…
    
    In other words, they just watched The Sheltering Sky.
    - toyg
      
      http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4119/4876696414_d3f62d18be_z.jpg
http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

Dutch law enforcement also complained.
http://lubke.net Flashman

I don’t know why the NI government’s reaction is considered worthy of ridicule. Sectarian terrorism is still a fact of life in Northern Ireland.
This would be like GM launching a car in Mexico called the Chevrolet Zeta.
- robuluz
  
  You have to admit, that has a ring to it!
  - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
    
    Honestly, naming a vehicle after a group known for ruthless efficiency in transportation is hardly the least sensible move…
    
    “The Chevy Zeta: Dedicated to those who stop at nothing to get where they are going.”
    - Finnagain
      
      How many bodies big is the trunk?
    - robuluz
      
      Man, I’m in. Put me down for one of these babies, they sound bad ass.
Heevee Lister

No worse than Dodge almost naming their version of the Plymouth Duster the Dodge Beaver. When someone young enough to have a clue suggested that might not be the best idea, they called it the Demon instead. Great idea, eh?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Why didn’t anyone catch “Hummer” or Ford “Probe”?
  - Finnagain
    
    Sex sells.
Halloween_Jack

Oh, FFS. Ben & Jerry’s getting rid of their Black & Tan ice cream just encouraged them. Look, I’m as much or more Irish as the next person, but you can get a black and tan in any bar that serves Guinness.
- http://www.lightning-rose.com/ LightningRose
  
  Fenton’s Creamery in Oakland, CA (Cameo’ed in the film “Up”) has a Black & Tan Sundae. Toasted almond ice cream with chocolate and caramel sauces. My fave.
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

The Toyota pick-up is gonna have some competition.
gwailo_joe

How about the Boko Caravan? ”Western Teaching is….so roomy!”
gwailo_joe

Peru’s Maoist “Shining Path-finder”? The Khmer Peugeot?

(Poor taste, perhaps…but the Chrysler Crossfire stands on its own merits)
donovan acree

I hear that Provo was supposed to be short for Performance Velocity. The original name Pervo didn’t market test so well.