EV names used to scream “electric.” Now they don’t. That shift says a lot about where we are and what naming has to keep up with.
The Evolution of EV Names
This week’s #tellthetruths digs in. Let me know what you think.
This video originally appeared in LinkedIn.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey guys, it’s Rebeca with BrandTrue, and today, I want to talk about the names for electric vehicles, and specifically, I’m really fascinated by the way that they’ve evolved over time. So around 2009, 2010, 2011, when these sorts of vehicles were emerging as something quite revolutionary, most of them had names that underscored the fact that they were electric.
So things like the Chevrolet Volt. I think there was also a Bolt, right? So we’ve got electricity, or also, Nissan introduced something at that time called the Leaf, so not so much the electricity metaphor, but the environmental metaphor with a leaf, plants, green. There’s always exceptions. Tesla has been an exception the whole time. They were coming out right around the same 2008, 2009, with model names to indicate electricity, but their whole brand was electric, so their model names were just letters. It’s a different animal.
But what’s been interesting to me is that as more and more automakers are making electric vehicles, and as electric vehicles are more and more well understood, they’re more driving machines now, so the names have really evolved quite a bit. Now you’ve got things like Porsche has an electric vehicle called a Taycan. Taycan, I’m not sure exactly how it’s pronounced, but just sounds like a fast car. Or in 2021, an entirely new electric car maker named Rivian came out, and I’m struck by that name. It doesn’t have any sort of electric or environmental overtone at all. It just sounds sort of fast and maybe a little bit expensive.
What I see most of all nowadays is since about 2021 or so, automakers, when they have an electric model, it’s just a version of an existing model. So like Chevrolet does that, also VW, they just have a car and then an electric version of that car. It’s now become a variety, a feature and not a different thing that has to be named in such a way that you can understand it. I think it’s a logical evolution. It makes sense and I think it’s…as a namer, it’s fascinating that the specialness is not needing any additional explanation anymore. I’d love to hear what you think about this stuff. Thanks. Bye!
