Speaking of an F Word...(Column)(Column)

Byline: Kevin A. Wilson

By dubbing its compact sedan shown in Detroit the Fusion, Ford's nefarious scheme has been made clear. It aims to name all its cars with an F word, just as the SUVs are named with E words.

This convention invites wordplay, so Ford SUVs are known around my place as the Excretion, the Exploitation, the Exploder and the Escallop. Now it looks like we'll have to go to work on the car line soon-and the easy road of using "the'' F word won't be allowed to stifle our creativity. We need snide-and clean-nicknames for Focus, Fusion, Five Hundred and soon, we're promised, something like the concept Fairlane.

That Ford has done this in the past could mean the names Futura, Falcon and Fairmont may be short-listed for revival. But Ford can't rename all its cars with an F. Who imagines Crown Vic or Mustang needs a new name?

Unless the product occupies a new niche for the automaker, a new name is often the next best thing to an admission the previous model in that segment was a relative failure. Notice how the Solstice isn't named Fiero, how XLR isn't called Allante, how the Pilot isn't named Passport? How long, do you think, before Toyota revives the name Echo? Those badges are all tarnished, at least for a while.

Yet you can sell cars named Accord, Camry, F-150 and Corvette for decades without ever contemplating a name change.

Such serial success doesn't mean you don't have to freshen the product, though. Sometimes names grow stale and stodgy by riding on the trunk lid of the same old crate for far too long. So when an automaker finally replaces a Cavalier or Escort, it brings in the naming experts. When Ford named the Taurus, it did so to mark the significant departure it had made from the sedans that came before. Somehow, Taurus has stopped meaning "new idea from Detroit'' and come to mean "same old idea from Detroit.''