Remembering our favorites on National Name Your Car Day

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who name their car and those who don’t. With Tuesday being National Name Your Car Day, we asked some of our staffers if they name their cars and, if they do, to give us the name and a brief explanation.

Check out their responses below:

Bob Golfen:

I’m not crazy about naming cars unless it comes naturally. 

My mom once had a funky 1962 Rambler American that we were all fond of and named Betsy, which suited it perfectly. I believe my mom named it. 

I once had a ratty Ford Falcon that my girlfriend at the time derisively named The Bullet.  

I’ve had two Saabs, both named Saaby, and a Pontiac Vibe GT named Vibey.

Currently, I have a 1962 Porsche 356 coupe that is named The Tub. Not a very original name, though, since these inverted-bathtub-style cars are universally known as tubs. There’s even a 356 club in Texas named The Tub Club.

Larry Edsall:

I don’t recall ever naming a vehicle I owned. Come to think about it, I really haven’t owned that many vehicles, though I’ve been fortunate to drive hundreds of them. If I don’t count the two cars I bought for my children to drive while in high school, I’ve only owned nine since I bought my first one for $500 back when I was in college back in the 1960s. 

If I had to pick a favorite car name, it probably would be Old Yeller, which Max Balchowsky tagged on to some race cars he built back in the 1950s, though the record-setting Mormon Meteor also has a pretty cool moniker.

Andy Reid:

I am with Larry in that I never named a car, but we did have a car many years ago, in 1997 or so. It was a very scruffy Jaguar Series 3 E-type roadster.

It was a poor buy, had issue after issue and rarely ran. My wife named the car The Steel Sculpture because it sat broken in front of our home more than it drive.

It was an appropriate name for that car.

Rebecca Nguyen:

Bananaru! I actually didn’t name it that, my car friends did. 

The color of my car is a factory color, Sonic Yellow, that Subaru only made in 2003. When it came time to replace the brakes, I ended up upgrading them and chose to run a big brake kit from Stoptech that typically comes in red. I was about to pull the trigger until someone said it’d make my car look like ketchup and mustard, so I opted to pay the extra dollar to get them in yellow instead. 

Once I got the calipers in, my fellow Subaru friends then made the comment that the calipers looked like bananas, which then shifted to calling my car the banana.

Personally, I hate bananas and anything banana flavored, so of course they continued to tease me with the banana name. I hated the name, they loved it, so we compromised and combined Subaru and banana to create Bananaru.

Carter Nacke:

I didn’t think I would ever be the type to name a car and I blame my father for it, who has named almost every one of his cars Casper (as in the ghost -– he only buys white cars).

While going through the oh-so-fun negotiating process for a Nissan Sentra, the first car I bought new, I looked over and remarked that the Desert Sage paint, prominent side mirrors and large eyes made it kind of look like Yoda from Star Wars.

The name and tradition stuck. Since then, I’ve driven a Mazda 3 I called Jango Fett (because of the silver paint job with blue interior accents) and a Chevrolet Colorado I fondly call R2, as in R2D2. It’s not a fitting name, but for some reason, it works.

Nick Calderone:

Aaaayyyyy! The coolest cat on TV when I was growing up was the Fonz from Happy Days. The leather jacket, dashing hair and motorcycle-riding swagger endeared audiences around the globe and he had young me captivated, too.The Fonz could solve 30 minutes of sitcoms problems with the snap of his fingers. That was cool, but I didn’t watch to learn to fix a jukebox with a slanted grin. I watched hoping the Fonz would show up on his bike. To an 8-year-old me, that was as good as TV could get.

When I turned 17 I scraped together a few hundred bucks and bought a 1973 Honda CB350 and promptly named it Fonzie. I didn’t care that it wasn’t a Triumph or that it didn’t look much like the bike on TV. My little Fonzie made me feel the sweet freedom of riding just the same and I felt cool.

Kristen Keogh:

I’ve actually never named a vehicle! I’ve owned a total of six cars and I just always referred to them by their model name.

However, when I was in college, I was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and had an Arizona State University license plate that just said “Theta.” My sisters lovingly started referring to my ride as the “Theta Mobile.”