Alphabet Soup - Are Numbers Or Names More Confusing When It Comes To Choosing A Model?

Lincoln and Cadillac should definitely go back to names. Both brands needs to be quintessentially American alternatives to the alphabet-soup Germans.

Alphabet soup names renders all brands who do that as wannabees.

I'd love to see Infiniti use names like Skyline, Dangan, other Japanese oriented names.

De Nysschen is whom we have to thank for making it painfully obvious that alphabet soup names are played out. He took a confusing alphabet soup mess at Infiniti and then replaced it with one that is equally stupid.

His biggest stumble was naming the new Cadillac the CT6 which is too close to CTS to stand out.

According to their proponents - Alpha Numerics advances the BRAND name overall - while individual names advance only one model. THe problem with that is - if you have a bad car for various reasons (THE packaging of the ATS for example) - it reflects on the WHOLE brand. WHile it would affect the single model with a NAME. Worse - when you go to replace an Unsuccessful car - the Alpha-numeric likely goes to the next version - where the name can be changed.

So - "Nguyenvuminh" YES - you can choose a new name when the names of the old ones bring back memories of a bad car - BUT if the Alpanumerics run in size order -How do you escape using the same designation for the next generation car. Makes no sense to me

I've been listening to the argument to use the old names for quite a while now and I want to finally put in my 2 cents. The name is fine if that original car was a good one, with strong reputation. The Fleetwood, El Dorado, etc. weren't good cars from what I remember. In fact, they were examples of why and how the US cars lost to the foreign makes in the 80s, 90s and early 2000; and I mean lost a whole generation of car buyers. To use the name of Mustangs, Camaro, Corvette, Thunderbird, some SUV names are good because they were good cars in their respective market segments but those old US sedans were better known as floating bloated boats. I know many of you are going to take offense at this but those old sedans are the reason why Accord and Camrys have been dominant for so long. Are you sure you want to bring back those old names?

Now if you were to tell me the argument is to use names instead of numbers, then I can see that but if that's the case, come up with new names; don't use the old ones that don't have a good image.

You clearly know nothing about the American classics and how they are thought of.

When your car friends ask you which car you drive and your answer is a BMW X4 xDrive28i do you really think it gets their heart beating faster or even know what your talking about? What if you said I drive a Cadillac Escalade or Elderado, Boss Mustang or Shelby, etc they would know right away. Names please.

Precisely. The people here who say that American heritage names have no value are blithering idiots under 25 who never look up from their iPhones. My favorite is the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham with the built in cocktail bar in the glove box. That is swanky.

The new A8 will be a clusterduck of idiotic Audi Avalon sameness, but lets assume Mark Lickme was capable of an original thought for the A8 that would make it stunning and a game changer, then calling it the Audi Prologue would set it apart.

Cadillac even went so far as to come up with plausible new names Evoq, Imaj, Converj, Cien, Ciel, Elmiraj...all of which were better than A/B/C/DTS and certainly better than CT1/2/3/4/5...