What’s in a name? Quite a lot of embarrassment, if you are Audi. Because it seems that its
e-tron electronic car
is, quite literally, crap in French.
How so? Well, save for the mercifully placed hyphen and an absent acute accent, e-tron (or rather étron) means turd en français. Not quite the image Audi would want to project for its clean, green sporty machine, we’re sure.
The vagaries of translation can, of course, be tricky for any sojourn into a foreign language (as a teenager I once told the mother of a Spanish acquaintance that I was aroused when I had intended to say that I was merely warm), but car manufacturers seem surprisingly susceptible to the mistranslation faux pas.
Audi’s is just the latest in a long line of car-name cock-ups. GM, for example, famously called one of its cars the Nova for Latin American markets, which, in Spanish, (sort of) translates as ‘doesn’t go’.
Then there was the Mitsubishi Pajero – which in Spain is a slang term for masturbation, as is ‘Lacrosse’ in French-Canadian, much to the disappointment of the marketing team for the Buick Lacrosse.
The biggest fail, however, was possibly the Ford Pinto. In Brazilian slang this means ‘small penis’. No wonder the car flopped…
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