Volkswagen Model Names Are Way Cooler Than You Think, Video Explains

We take the Polo and Golf for granted a little bit, but when Volkswagen originally started naming its cars back almost half a century ago, it used the names of winds. The Golf is not inspired by the sport where you hit little balls with clubs, but by the Gulfstream. Jetta? Jetstream. And the Passat is a trade wind for boats and stuff.

Meanwhile, Polo is a reference to the polar wind. Unless we're mistaken, the Scirocco is another name for Ghibli, a dry, hot wind that blows from the Sahara desert into Southern Europe.

According to this cool little video from Carfection, the Eos, Phaeton, and Atlas have their roots in mythological gods and stuff. Everybody knows about Atlas, the guy who had the tough job of holding up the word. Eos is the goddess of the dawn (not Rolls-Royce) while Phaeton pulled the sun across the sky with his magical chariot.

The guy in the video argues that the CC name was kind of sad, being short for comfort coupe. But if people understood that these cars aren't built for handling, we wouldn't have such false expectations. Something tells us the Arteon name, which is cool now, will age badly.

While a little difficult to spell if you're not a car guy, the VW Touareg is named after a nomadic tribe and uses up quite a lot of vowels. But the people who are currently in charge of naming cars aren't as creative as their predecessors.

For example, they are trying to force the letter T onto all the crossovers, but without creating full names like Skoda does with its K series (Karoq and Kodiaq). So you've got the T-Roc and T-Cross, which mean nothing. The Up! isn't very creative either, not to mention it messes with our spell checking software by using punctuation in the middle of a phrase.