Driving to work every day you see weird names on products that cost thousands of dollars. Venza, Solara, Celica, Tercel, Previa, Yaris. They’re all Toyotas.

Hyundai sells an Elantra and an Azera. Mitsubishi has a Galant, one l. Mazda has a Miata. They’re all just random collections of vowels and consonants.

Not too long ago all car names made at least some kind of sense. Rolls and Royce were real people. So were Mercedes (Daimler’s daughter) and Benz. Henry Ford was a real guy, albeit a sort of Nazi. Louis Chevrolet was a Swiss race car driver who once worked for David Buick, also a real guy – a Scot. Horace and John Dodge were real and so was Walter Chrysler. Cadillac was a Frenchman. Pontiac was an Indian Chief. American Motors was descriptive and slightly patriotic. BMW stands for Bavaria Motor Works (actually Bayerische Motoren Werke) which is fine. Jaguar is a sleek critter and the car used to be.

The sub brands’ names made sense, too, like Chevrolet’s Impala (a fast kind of antelope) and Biscayne (a Bay and a long Boulevard in Miami). Pontiac’s Bonneville was named after the racing salt flats in Utah. American Motors’ Rambler played perfectly on the fairly new idea of a family drive just for the fun of it.

A lot of foreign companies, and a few American ones, use letters and/or numbers for their sub brands, like BMW’s 528i and 633CSi or Mercedes’s 300CD-T. They probably don’t mean much (the bigger the car, the bigger the number) but they sound nifty. Occasionally, Mercedes Benz will come up with something teutonically pompous like Kompressor or Kommander.

One thing the traditional kind of car names have (and most American car names still have) in common is that they’re real words: Thunderbird, Mercury, Charger, Tempo, Lincoln, Studebaker, Dart, Neon, Topaz, Ranger, Suburban, Explorer. Even Fairlane and Galaxie were close enough.

Honda seems to have gone along with the make-sense notion for their cars’ names: Accord, Civic, Odyssey, Passport. Toyota makes a lot of different car brands and nearly all the names make no sense but every now and then they’ll come up with a Tundra or a Land Cruiser. Even Sequoia sounds kind of cool and some people even know that it’s a big tree.

Toyota is probably the most successful car company in the world and its product names are mostly gobbledygook. What does that tell us?

It’s the product. Don’t worry about the damned name, except maybe for Volkswagen’s Touareg which nobody can pronounce.