Have you seen my Murcielago?

It must be increasingly difficult for car manufacturers to come up with new names for their vehicles. Some, like Puegot, try to stick to numbers and only let themselves down with the models like the Tepee. BMW have got it about right. You know that the pecking order starts with the 1 series and works its way up to the 7 series. All you have to figure out then is whether a CSi is better than an SE. Seat also have it cracked with Leon Altea etc. It might be sometime before we see the Seat Bigastro though.

Obviously, the car moguls have to be careful not to choose names which might offend people in the different marketplaces. Although Fanny might be a perfectly acceptable name for a car in France it would probably raise a titter in some other countries.

So the creative geniuses at manufacture's HQ come up with a series of made up words which probably have no meaning at all. They try to invent words that convey some sense of the car and its place in the market without any obvious connotations.

Hence we have Vauxhall's Antara and Monaro; Toyota 's Aygo; Suzuki's Jimny; Renault's Twingo and Kangoo and the latest; the Ford Kuga (does sound a bit like a previous model that one).

The one that takes my prize though is the Nissan Qashqai. Just what that name is meant to convey I don't know. It's hard enough to pronounce let alone understand.

I can't help feel that it was all a lot easier when most people drove a Cortina- we all knew what that was and what it looked like.

PS Mel Leach tells me that the Qashqai are a Turkic people living in Iran. I suppose I should have guessed it had to be something like that because nobody would dream up a name like Qashqai. Thanks for that information Mel.