Do You Name Your Car?

A survey by the AA has found that 4 out of 10 drivers give their car a name. Do you?

If you have named your car, then chances are – according to the survey – you are a younger driver (aged 18-24), are more likely to be female, and will call your car something that is based on its registration number, or on its personality.

If you have called your car Bluebelle, Betsy, Bertha, Freddie or Freda, or something beginning with ‘old’, then you’re not alone. Or maybe you’ve named them in honour of a famous vehicle – such as Lightning McQueen or Herbie?

The naming of cars is a time-honoured tradition, and is likeliest in younger drivers because of the excitement of getting a first car and all it entails. After all, we name our planes and ships for luck, so why not our cars? I mean, even celebrities name their cars.

.The psychology of naming cars

Anthropomorphism is the term used to explain how we bestow personalities onto inanimate objects, and the issues around this. We often look at our cars as members of our family, as a friend, or as a partner in crime. It’s interesting how we often give our cars a personality and name though and not, for example, our lawn mower or the television. Maybe it’s because our car accompanies us on our adventures, and because they can often seem to have human-like facial features in their grills and headlights. We invest time and money in keeping them ‘alive’, much more than we do in something like our washing machines.

Cars also have a ‘voice’ and can seem to be happy, or to grumble on a cold morning like the best of us. Giving our car a human side helps us to make sense of it and its behaviour – who hasn’t asked their car to behave itself when it looks like it might be letting us down, or blamed the car when you’ve been caught speeding? Think Basil Fawlty who famously gave his car a ‘good thrashing’ when it broke down while he was running an important errand. I would bet that Basil’s car had a couple of names for him too.

*WARNING* Contains bad language and lots of thrashing

Naming your car is also a way of giving it distinction. After all, if your car is one of the of thousands of Ford Focuses sold worldwide every year, then giving it its own little title is understandable. It’s happened for years – before cars, people named their horses; they didn’t just call them all ‘Horse’.

.National Name your Car Day

National Name your Car day is on October 2nd, and is a way of encouraging people to engage more with their cars by giving them a name to be proud of – so if you haven’t named your car already and you want some suggestions, check out this car name generator from Confused.com

Or how about this on Buzzfeed? – How to name your car

So what do you call your car?