25 car makers named after people

What’s in a name?

Everyone who has ever created a car company has had to face the problem of what to call it.

Many strategies have been used for this, but the easiest is to name the company after yourself. A more complicated variant is to name it after someone else. This might be a relative, or an investor, or perhaps even the founder of the city where your company is based.

Which are which? We can’t list them all, but let’s find out more about 25 of the world’s car manufacturers named after people – enjoy!

1. Alfa Romeo

The ‘Alfa’ part of Alfa Romeo stands for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili, and you don’t have to know much Italian to realise that no one has ever been called that.

Translated into English, it means Lombardy Car Factory Limited, after the region of Italy which contains Milan, where Alfa was founded (though it is now based in Turin).

Alfa began operations in 1910, and was taken over by entrepreneur Nicola Romeo five years later. The first car badged as an Alfa Romeo was the 20/30HP ES Sport, which went into production in 1921. Romeo left the company in 1928, but his name has never been dropped from its title.

2. Aston Martin

Aston Martin was founded in 1913 by Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford, who had started out as car dealers the previous year but wanted to try their hand at car production.

Martin’s surname was used for the second half of the title, which inevitably means he is better remembered in motoring circles than Bamford.

The ‘Aston’ part quite definitely does not refer to the Buckinghamshire village of Aston Clinton, no matter what anyone may tell you, but to the nearby Aston Hill, which was used as a hillclimb venue until 1925.

3. Audi

Audi is named, rather circuitously, after German engineer August Horch. We’ll come to his first company later on.

For now, it’s enough to say that his second, founded in 1910, could not be called Horch because he no longer had the legal right to use his own name.

Instead – and, it is believed, at the suggestion of the son of one of Horch’s business partners – the name Audi was chosen, since ‘horch!’ and ‘audi!’ mean ‘listen!’ in German and Latin respectively. The accepted Latin pronunciation is ‘aw-dee’, but ‘ow-dee’ is more natural to German speakers.

4. Benz

Karl Benz built what is widely believed to be the first car in 1885 and called it the Benz Patent Motorcar.

This essentially means he named it after himself, but we should perhaps include his wife Bertha, who realised the potential of the machine far better than Karl did and took one of the early models on the world’s first road trip, in the process becoming the world’s first test driver.

The Benz company no longer exists as a separate entity, but its creator and his wife are still part of the motoring world. We may nowadays speak lazily of ‘Mercedes’ cars, but the correct name is ‘Mercedes-Benz’.

5. Borgward

Like Auto Union, which evolved into today’s Audi, the Borgward group consisted of four German manufacturers. Its creator, Carl Borgward, named one of them after himself. The others were Goliath, Hansa and Lloyd.

The group collapsed in controversial circumstances in 1961, but a new Borgward, co-founded by Carl’s grandson Christian, was created in 2008.

6. Buick

Very much like Vauxhall, Buick was founded by a Scotsman in the 19th century as a manufacturer of marine engines and moved into the car manufacturing business in 1903.

The Scotsman in question was David Dunbar Buick, whose family moved from the east coast town of Arbroath when David was two years old.

His company became the cornerstone of the newly founded General Motors in 1908, but Buick had left it in 1906. Almost penniless, he died in 1929 at the age of 74.
 

7. Cadillac

Cadillac, formed from the remains of Henry Ford’s second (of three) car companies, is unique among automobile manufacturers in that it was named after a man who died in 1730.

Antoine de la Mothe adopted the title of sieur de Cadillac, which referred to a town in south-west France, on his arrival in North America.

While there, he established a settlement which later became known as Detroit. The manufacturer was founded in that city, though its headquarters are now around 20 miles north in Warren, Michigan.
 

8. Chevrolet

Chevrolet was founded in 1911 by Swiss racing driver Louis Chevrolet and American businessman William Durant, who had created General Motors but was forced out of it in 1910.

The Chevrolet company was so profitable that Durant was able to buy his way back into GM. By that time Louis Chevrolet was no longer involved with the company which had been named after him.

In 1916 he founded both the Frontenac Motor Corporation and the American Motors Corporation, neither of which survived beyond the 1920s.
 

9. Chrysler

After running Buick very successfully for several years, the now enormously wealthy Walter Chrysler established the Chrysler Corporation in 1925.

This worked even better for him than Buick had done. In 1928 he became the second person after aviator Charles Lindbergh to be named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

He was by now rich enough to be able to finance the construction of New York’s Chrysler Building, which was the tallest in the world for just short of a year after its completion in May 1930.

10. Citroën

André Citroën’s surname, which is also the Dutch word for ‘lemon’, refers to the fact that one of his grandfathers worked in The Netherlands as a greengrocer.

After doing well for himself in armaments production during World War 1, Citroën founded his eponymous car company the following year.

Very successful in its early days, the business was overstretched by the development of the brilliant Traction Avant, which featured a unitary body, front-wheel drive and all-round independent suspension. This drove Citroën into bankruptcy in late 1934. Michelin saved the company, but André Citroën, now suffering from cancer, died only half a year later.

11. Daimler

After starting out as an engine designer, Gottlieb Daimler built his first car at around the same time as Karl Benz. With Wilhelm Maybach, he went on to found the Daimler Motors Corporation in 1890.

This company merged with the one created by Benz in 1926. This was the start of what is now known as Daimler AG, owner of Mercedes-Benz among many other brands. Gottlieb Daimler did not live to see any of this, having died in 1900.
 

12. Dodge

Horace Elgin Dodge and John Francis Dodge established the Dodge Brothers company in 1900 as a supplier of parts and assemblies to Detroit-based manufacturers, but became a rival to them when they began building their own cars in 1914.

Tragically, both brothers died in 1920, John in January and Horace in December. Their company was sold to Chrysler eight years later.

13. Ferrari

Having named the Scuderia Ferrari race team after himself in 1929, it was inevitable that Enzo Ferrari would do the same when he created his car company 10 years later. Its first product, built in 1940, did not however carry a Ferrari badge – that would not happen until 1947.

Ferrari’s son Alfredino, known as Dino, died in 1956 at the age of 24. Enzo used his name for a sub-brand of relatively low-cost Ferraris, though this was absorbed back into the main company in 1976.

14. Ford

Henry Ford has the distinction of having founded three companies and naming two of them after himself. His Detroit Automobile Company was quite the flash in a pan, producing its first car in January 1900 but being dissolved a year later.

The Henry Ford Company was up and running before 1901 was out, but following an argument with its investors only a few months later Ford left the business, which was reformed as Cadillac.

His most successful venture was the Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903 and still one of the world’s largest car manufacturers.

15. Honda

Soichiro Honda entered the motor industry by founding a company which made piston rings for Toyota.

He later moved into manufacturing motorised bicycles, then motorcycles, and eventually four-wheelers, starting with the Honda T360 pick-up of 1963.

Honda retired as president of his company in 1973 but stayed on as a director. He died in 1991, aged 84.

16. Horch

August Horch created Audi (see number three/slide four) after withdrawing from an earlier company he had named after himself following an internal dispute.

Ironically, the two brands were brought back together in 1932 when the state bank of Saxony suggested that DKW, which had already bought Audi, should also take on Horch and Wanderer, thereby creating Auto Union and preventing the collapse of the local motor industry.

By the time August died in 1951, both Horch and Audi were gone. Horch never came back, but the Audi name was resurrected in the 1960s and is still with us today.

17. Maserati

Maserati was named after four (Alfieri, Bindo, Ettore and Ernesto) of the six Maserati brothers who survived into adulthood. Another brother, Mario, who was more interested in art than cars, designed the marque’s trident logo.

The Maserati company was established in 1914. Alfieri died in 1932, and the remaining brothers kept the company for another five years before selling it to the Orsi family.
 

18. Mercedes

Mercédès Jellinek was the daughter of Daimler agent Emil Jellinek, who commissioned a remarkable sports car from the company in 1901 and named it after her.

The Mercedes 35hp was extremely successful, and Daimler began to use Mercedes as a brand name, as it still does.

Although she came from a wealthy family, Mercédès Jellinek had a hard life, suffering two failed marriages and great financial hardship. She died three years after the Daimler-Benz merger of 1926, aged just 39.

19. Morgan

Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan founded a car company under his own name in 1910, and built nothing but three-wheelers until the launch of the 4/4 in 1936.

On his death in 1959, the company was taken over by his son Peter, whose own son Charles later became Managing Director. Since 2013 there has been no member of the family on the board of Morgan.

20. Peugeot

Peugeot began as a family firm in 1810, making such diverse items as bicycles, grinders and frames for crinoline dresses, but today’s company strictly speaking dates back to Armand Peugeot’s founding of Automobiles Peugeot in 1896.

Members of the Peugeot family still own shares in the brand today, more than 200 years after their ancestors set up in business.

21. Renault

Following the success of the Renault Quadricycle, which astonished onlookers by being able to climb the Rue Lepic in Paris under its own power on Christmas Eve 1898, Renault was created by Louis Renault (who was in charge of engineering) and his brothers Marcel and Fernand (who looked after the business side).

Marcel was killed in an accident during the 1903 Paris-Madrid race, while Fernand died of ill-health six years later. Louis survived until 1944, when he died in circumstances which have been described as ‘uncertain’.

22. Suzuki

The Japanese company was founded as a manufacturer of silk-weaving looms in 1909 by Michio Suzuki, who became interested in building cars in the mid 1930s. In fact the first Suzuki car, the Suzulight, was not produced until 1955, long after Suzuki had built up a fine reputation for its motorcycles.

Michio Suzuki died in 1982. The company’s current chairman is 92-year-old Osamu Suzuki, who is not a blood relative but an adopted son-in-law. This is a common relationship in Japanese families, and in fact Osamu is the fourth in a series of adoptees to have had control of the company.

23. Toyota

Toyota is almost, but not quite, named after Sakichi Toyoda, who, like Michio Suzuki, started out in the weaving-loom business.

The first car was produced by that company’s automotive division in 1935, under the direction of Michio’s son Kiichiro Toyoda.

The name was changed the following year. Among other reasons for this, Toyota is simpler to write in Japanese characters than Toyoda is, and it also sounds nicer to Japanese speakers.

24. TVR

TVR looks like it should represent three words. In fact, it is a contraction of the first name of the company’s founder, Trevor Wilkinson.

When Wilkinson set up the business in 1946, he used the name Trevcar Motors, but this was quickly changed.

Wilkinson left TVR in 1962 (when its most powerful model was the 1.8-litre BMC-engined Grantura) and died in 2008.

25. Volkswagen

If the car which later became known as the VW Beetle had been named after one specific person, it could reasonably have been called the Porsche (after Ferdinand Porsche, who led the design team) or, more ominously, the Hitler.

In fact, Volkswagen is the German word for ‘people’s car’, so it might not be too fanciful to suggest that it is named after everybody.