Name Game: Familiar Rigs in Other Markets
Much digital ink has been spilled about the practice of badge engineering. And while it is the Detroit automakers which (rightly) get pilloried for this most often, there’s no shortage of examples in which other brands got in on the action for one reason or another.
Didja know the Subaru Forester was marketed as a Chevrolet in the Indian market for a spell? It didn’t even get unique styling; a gold bowtie was simply cut and pasted onto its grille. Most gearheads know about the Japanese-market Cavalier which was badged as a Toyota, to say nothing of joint mashups over the years between those companies which resulted in cars like the Geo Prizm and Pontiac Vibe - Toyotas by any other name. Honda had its fair share of Isuzus back in the day and continues with GM associations in the present with cars like the Prologue.
[Images: GM, Ford]
Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
But we’ll make a post about those some other day. This screed is about vehicles which retain a badge of the mother ship but get a different model name for some reason or another. Perhaps there might be a language barrier, or some sort of connotation in a market which renders the original name unusable. A great example of the latter was the departed Buick Lacrosse which showed up in Canada during its first generation as the Buick Allure. Why? Some hyper-alert person in the bowels of Ren Cen figured out that ‘lacrosse’ could be construed as a filthy term in Quebec, though it would take a bit of a stretch to do so. Still, name game paranoia prevailed during that car’s first generation and the thing had two names in vastly similar markets. Once the second-gen car rolled around, General Motors Canada renamed the Allure to LaCrosse in Canada, corresponding with global marketing efforts; GM Canada apparently even offered existing Allure owners the option to change nameplates to LaCrosse.
Ford markets the F-150 as the Ford Lobo in Mexico, using the Spanish term for ‘wolf’ instead of the alphanumeric that’s instantly recognizable in America. Marketers say it is an effort to appeal to a demographic which is younger and of a different target than customers seeking a base model work truck.
Eagle eyes will have noticed whilst watching Sicario, a 2015 movie starring Benicio del Toro, that car wranglers correctly used Lobo-branded pickup trucks for scenes involving Mexican federales instead of deploying easier-to-find F-150s from America. Ford has recently leaned into the Lobo name, applying it to sporty(ish) trims of the F-150 and Maverick for sale in the States.
During certain iterations and in particular markets, the Ford Fusion was simply a Ford Mondeo by a different name. Why the Blue Oval felt it necessary to invent a new name for the American market remains a mystery, though the company was going through a period in which all its cars (remember when Ford made cars?) started with the letter ‘F’. Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, Five Hundred - it was a weird era.
This author still thinks it should have gone with Futura as a nod to the past. In any event, it didn’t matter - not long after this, Alan Mullaly correctly decreed the Five Hundred should be rechristened the Taurus, righting a self-inflicted injury in which Ford threw away 30 years of name recognition for no good reason.
