Ask for It by Name!

Land Rover owners and their yuppified Range Rover-flaunting cousins may be a little chagrined to learn that the moniker of their rugged but pricey rides first graced that humblest of kiddie conveyances — a tricycle.
First produced by a bicycle firm in Coventry, England in 1887, Rover tricycles were eventually superseded by Rover cars in 1904, and by the beginning of World War II, Rover had become one of Britain’s most popular auto brands.

After the war, however, stringent government steel rationing put a crimp in Rover’s production and imperiled the future of the company. A new product was needed, preferably one that used as little steel as possible. Two of Rover’s directors, brothers Maurice and Spencer Wilks, decided that the market was wide-open for a utility vehicle similar to the American jeep so widely used in the war, and set out to design their own version. Using as little of the scarce steel as possible, they built the chassis out of light but strong aluminum alloy and debuted their creation in 1948, choosing the name Land Rover to convey the vehicle’s rugged four-wheel-drive ability to traverse any kind of terrain. The Land Rover was an immediate success, and subsequent models were popular with both civilians and many of the world’s armies.

By the late 1960s, the emergence of the recreational “off road” vehicle market led to the development of a more refined version of the Land Rover, one that would combine rugged construction with the cushier comforts of Rover’s standard car lines. The result, introduced in 1970, was the Range Rover, the name conjuring up visions not of explorers or soldiers, but country gentry spending Sunday afternoon inspecting their vast estates. Or maybe just looking cool driving to the local mall.

Mercedes-Benz automobiles, one of the world’s luxury brands, are the legacy of two innovators in the motor car industry at the beginning of the 20th century. But neither was named “Mercedes.”

Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz were born only a few miles and ten years apart in mid-19th century Germany, but pursued parallel careers and did not work together until late in their lives. Both Daimler and Benz formed their own car companies in the 1880s and produced lines of automobiles under their own names until economic necessity dictated the merger of their companies in 1926 into Daimler-Benz.

While Daimler was still an independent corporation in 1898, an Austrian financier named Emil Jellinek approached the company requesting increasingly powerful cars for use in his hobby of auto racing, particularly in the French Tour de Nice race. In entering the race with his Daimler car, Jellinek used the pseudonym “Mercedes,” the name of his 10-year old daughter.

Jellinek worked with Daimler for several years distributing their cars and collaborating on designs, and eventually his race pseudonym “Mercedes” was adopted by Daimler as the model name of a race car in 1900. Conventional “Mercedes” cars followed, and the Mercedes brand became so famous all over Europe that when Daimler and Benz finally merged the resulting primary brand was “Mercedes-Benz,” with “Daimler-Benz” relegated to secondary use.

Meanwhile, Emil Jellinek, aware of the commercial significance of his pseudonym, asked and got permission from Daimler to legally call himself “Jellinek-Mercedes,” noting that “This is probably the first time that a father has taken his daughter’s name.”