A few friends and I drove around the recent Monterey Auto Week in a 2008 Nissan Rogue. It’s a new sport utility vehicle that offers a lot for a good price point — around $23,000.
What the Rogue doesn’t have is a good name.
My friends and I had a pretty easy and fun time calling ourselves rogues. And there we were finding our way around Pebble Beach and Laguna Seca and parking next to wondrous machines with well-heeled nameplates like Bentley, Maserati and Ferrari.
So why would Nissan call its new SUV Rogue?
As a noun, rogue is defined:
* An unprincipled, deceitful and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal. * One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp. * A wandering beggar; a vagrant. * A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd. * An organism, especially a plant that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.
And as adjective, rogue is defined:
* Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant. * Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado. * Operating outside normal or desirable
controls.
Any of those seem like a good fit for a car?
My friends and I had fun joking about being rogues and cruising around in our rogue-mobile. But it's just a bad name for a car.
But perhaps as a new vehicle for 2008, the Rogue just hasn’t been around long enough to make the all-time list of Worst Car Names.
According to the web site, www.jalopnik.com, subtitled: “Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars,” here’s the list in reverse of the top-10 worst car names.
I’ve included images of the Nissan Rogue and the Mazda Scrum Wagon, which Jalopnik cites as the worst named car in history.
