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We live in an age of silent electric motors, autonomous sensors and cars that can practically park themselves. We’ve spent billions of dollars engineering the future, but we’re apparently too sentimental to come up with new names for many of the car's parts.
If you look closely at your sleek, modern interior, you’ll find it’s littered with ghosts from the horse-and-buggy era. It turns out that while technology moves at the speed of light, humans prefer to keep calling things by the names our ancestors used while they were shovelling hay and riding horses.
Buckle up, word nerds, as we look at some of the ancient names that are still around in our modern machines.
Marketing in the 1700s wasn't subject to a consumer commission, so all kinds of claims and results could be made up – think of poisons and illicit drugs being marketed to parents so their kids kept quiet, or indeed the term 'horsepower' for an engine.
When James Watt was trying to sell his new steam engines in the 1780s, people understood transport and power in terms of horses. Watt did some quick, arguably sketchy math to claim his steam engines could do the work of a certain number of pit ponies, claiming his engines could lift 33,000 pounds by one foot every minute.
He lied – a horse can produce a peak of about 15 horsepower. But the name stuck, and we’ve compared internal combustion to farm animals ever since.
The dashboard was a literal board designed to catch filth. In the horse-and-buggy era, horses at a 'full dash' had a tendency to kick up a cocktail of mud, rocks – and of course manure – directly into the driver’s face.
Carriage-makers developed a wooden barrier to at least partially block the debris. When engines replaced horses, the board stayed put, and the name stuck, even though the mud and poop no longer did.
For something quite modern, the name Bluetooth is rather medieval. It was actually named by engineers who clearly spent too much time reading Norse history (not that it's a bad thing).
The moniker comes from a monarch, King Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century Viking who is credited with uniting Scandinavia. He also had a dead, greyish-blue tooth that earned him the nickname.
The creators of the tech figured that if Harald could unite warring tribes, their tech could unite computers and cellular devices. They intended the name to be a placeholder, but like a bad tooth, it stayed in our faces and our vernacular.
We usually associate this with teenagers trying to make their hatched boots look like a helipad, but the name isn't just commentary for how they can spoil the car’s aesthetics; it’s a job description.
Aerodynamically, air hates being interrupted. As it flows over a car, it creates lift and drag. A spoiler’s job is to literally spoil that smooth airflow, breaking up the wind currents to stabilise the car's rear end and keep the rear wheels pushed onto the asphalt. It’s the automotive equivalent of a paperweight, keeping your car from trying to become a very poorly designed airplane at high speeds.
Back when driving was a contact sport, cars lacked basic conveniences like roofs, heaters and windshields.
Steering wheels were made of either splintery wood or freezing metal, and if you didn't wear sturdy leather gloves, your hands would either be frostbitten or blistered within no time.
Car maker Packard eventually got tired of drivers losing their gear and bolted a box to the dash. Others followed suit.
Speaking of car storage, the first cars didn't really have integrated cargo areas – you literally strapped a heavy wooden trunk to a rack on the back of the car and hoped it didn't rain (or fall off). Eventually, engineers realised that building a space for luggage into the car was a better idea than letting your suitcases (trunks) fly off on the highway.
Similarly, the name 'boot' came from Britain, and the boot locker, which was a literal cupboard on horse carriages where the coachman sat and stored his boots.
In the 17th century, when raw sewage was a very real thing on the road instead of flowing underneath it, there was the invention of the Sedan Chair.
This was essentially an enclosed single-seater carriage on poles carried by some poor, tired men, and for a time, it was the way for the upper class to travel short distances without marking up their tights.
When cars came along, the industry hijacked the word to describe a completely enclosed vehicle.
Even the word car itself is a hand-me-down. It traces back to the Latin 'carrus', which referred to a two-wheeled war chariot. So when you drive a car, linguistically speaking, you are headed into battle in a chariot. Which is pretty much what peak-hour drivers do every day...
You’re now officially over-qualified for your next car trivia night. Do you have a good car name and background story you want to share? Tell us!
Samantha has been obsessed with cars and combustion engines for most of her life, and has spent the past 25 years deep in the automotive and motorsport industries. An automotive awards judge, rally driver and motorsport tragic, she spends weekdays writing about cars and weekends off-road, off-grid or running amok at the track.
