Going like the wind
Among the various inspirations for model names, atmospheric turbulence has been used several times by manufacturers, in some cases on a regular basis.
Here are 24 examples, all of them relating to production cars sold (or at least revealed) before the end of the 20th century, and listed in alphabetical order.
Treating the subject as broadly as possible, we’re including vehicles named after, or in some cases just sharing their names with, not just specific winds but also wind-adjacent phenomena in general.
1. Austin/MG Maestro
Both in chronological order and in terms of size, the Maestro came between the earlier and smaller Metro and the later and larger Montego.
The naming policy of British Leyland (and later the Rover Group) in the 1980s should be clear from this, and does not need further explanation.
As for the word ‘maestro’ in particular, it seems reasonable to conclude that the manufacturer was thinking of the Italian word for ‘master’, whose applications include, but are not limited to, conductors of symphony orchestras.
However, a maestro is also a wind, defined by the American Meteorological Society as “a northwesterly wind with fine weather that blows, especially in summer, in the Adriatic”.
2. Ford Zephyr
A zephyr is a usually gentle wind which blows from the west.
It is personified by Zephyrus, or perhaps Zephyros, who, along with his three brothers, made up the Greek wind deities called Anemoi.
(Their mother was Eos, the goddess of the dawn, whose name was used by Volkswagen for a coupe-convertible.)
The Ford Motor Company has used Zephyr several times, but the only cars of that name sold under the Ford brand were the four generations of British model produced from 1950 to 1972.
3. GMC Syclone
Available only in the 1991 model year, the Syclone was a derivative of the GMC Sonoma pick-up truck (essentially a rebadged Chevrolet S-10) with a turbocharged 4.3-liter V6 engine and four-wheel drive.
In an independent test, a Syclone covered a standing quarter-mile 0.4 secs faster than a Ferrari 348ts, though it should be pointed out that the Ferrari was gaining rapidly at the end of the run and would certainly have been quicker over half a mile.
‘Syclone’ is a deliberate mis-spelling of the word ‘cyclone’, a very large mass of rotating air.
A cyclone is therefore not specifically a wind, but if you’re caught in one you’ll find a lot of windiness going on, unless you’re standing in the middle.
4. GMC Typhoon
A typhoon is very much the same sort of thing as a cyclone, except that it is found only in tropical regions.
GMC used the name for a high-performance SUV sold in 1992 and 1993.
It was mechanically almost identical to the slightly earlier Syclone, and just as fast, though its credentials as an SUV were weakened by its negligible off-road ability and its inability to tow anything.
Still, if anyone had hitched a trailer to it, it wouldn’t have been as fast as a Ferrari, and that would have been a shame.
5. Holden Camira
The Camira was one of the less popular of the many cars based on the General Motors J platform.
As such, it was a close relative of, among others, the European Vauxhall Cavalier and Opel Ascona and the North American Buick Skyhawk and Cadillac Cimarron.
It has the same name as a suburb of the city of Ipswich in Queensland, whose residents might not have been impressed by the car’s poor reputation in Australia.
Both the vehicle and the place take their name from an aboriginal word which, according to several sources, means ‘wind’, or ‘windy’, or perhaps ‘of the wind’.
6. Lamborghini Diablo
Like the Countach it replaced in 1990, the Diablo was a two-seat supercar with a mid-mounted V12 engine.
There is almost no reason for it to appear in the same sentence as the Austin Maestro (which might in fact be happening here for the first time), but there is a very tenuous connection.
Both cars share their names with winds, although you can bet your house on the fact that neither manufacturer had this in mind during the development process.
A hot, dry, northeasterly wind which often occurs in northern California is known as a diablo, partly because it is generated near Mount Diablo, but Lamborghini is far more likely to have chosen the name because it means ‘devil’ in Spanish.
7. Lincoln Zephyr
Ford’s luxury division used the Zephyr name for a remarkable model introduced in 1936.
Despite its relatively low price, it was powered by a V12 engine which, to keep costs down, shared some components with the Ford flathead V8.
Its main weakness was that its exhaust was ported through the cylinder block, which created overheating and contributed to an early reputation for unreliability.
Improvements were made, but not before people had started joking that “a lingering puff of smoke at a stoplight meant a Zephyr had just left”.
8. Maserati Bora
Maserati used winds for six of its car names in the 20th century.
The first, alphabetically if not chronologically, is the Bora, a mid-engined sports car produced for most of the 1970s.
Like the maestro, the bora is a wind often encountered in the Adriatic Sea, though unlike the maestro it is generated in mountains to the north-east, and can make conditions perilous for sailors.
Depending on atmospheric conditions, there are two types of bora called either white and black or light and dark, but Maserati did not make a distinction between them.
9. Maserati Ghibli
Also known as sirocco, the ghibli occurs when a low-pressure area around the Mediterranean attracts hot, and usually dusty, air from Africa.
It’s generally unpopular, but this hasn’t stopped Maserati from using it as a model name for front-engined cars three times in nearly 60 years, though with long gaps between generations.
The first Ghibli was a sleek coupe produced from 1967 to 1973, while the second, based on the earlier Biturbo, was produced in the 1990s.
The current Ghibli, the first with four doors rather than two, was unveiled in 2013 and is still on sale today.
10. Maserati Karif
Perhaps not the most elegant car Maserati ever devised, the Karif was based on the same platform as the Biturbo Spyder.
The combination of that car’s reinforced sills and a solid roof gave the Karif excellent rigidity, though the awkward appearance might explain why, according to Maserati itself, it found only 221 buyers.
The karif wind, also spelled kharif, is similar to the ghibli/sirocco in that it is caused by hot and dusty air being drawn from Africa into a low-pressure area.
In this case, though, the area is in the Gulf of Aden, and the wind most commonly occurs between evening and noon during monsoon season.
11. Maserati Khamsin
The Khamsin was the first Maserati designed by Marcello Gandini, the last developed while Giulio Alfieri was still head of the engineering department, and the last front-engined grand tourer before the 3200GT of the late 1990s.
Produced from 1974 to 1982, it had the same V8 engine as the earlier Ghibli, and like that car it was also named after a notably unpleasant wind.
The khamsin is similar to the ghibli in that it is produced by dust-laden air being drawn from Africa into the Mediterranean, though it occurs further to the east, across Egypt and parts of Saudi Arabia.
The name comes from the Arabic word for ‘50’, which refers to the approximate number of days it usually lasts.
12. Maserati Mistral
After giving its cars unimaginative names like A6 and 3500GT for several years, Maserati adopted its wind policy for the first time with the Mistral, produced from 1964 to 1969.
Available as both a coupe and a Spyder, the Mistral was the last Maserati powered by the straight-six engine the company had been using for more than a decade.
Though less unpleasant than some of the others mentioned here, the mistral is a cold and often very strong wind which blows southwards through France.
It can blow for days on end, which is rather tiresome, but one thing to be said in its favor is that it doesn’t bring any dust with it.
13. Maserati Shamal
Unlike the mistral, the shamal can carry very large quantities of sand or dust.
This can cause major problems in countries around the Persian Gulf, where the wind blows from the north-west.
The Maserati named after it was produced from 1990 to 1996, and has a reputation for what might be called interesting handling, though Maserati describes it more positively as being “intended for skilled drivers”.
The Shamal was part of the Biturbo family, but was powered by a 3.2-liter V8 engine rather than the smaller V6 found under the hood of its relatives.
14. Mercury Cyclone
Originally known as the Comet Cyclone, Mercury’s muscle car was produced in five generations from 1964 to 1971.
The name was used for a little longer, but only for a performance package offered as an option on the second-generation Mercury Montego.
The most famous Cyclone was the Spoiler II, one of the four Aero Warriors developed by Ford and Chrysler for NASCAR racing.
Built in very small numbers in early 1969, it was almost exactly the same thing as the Ford Torino Talladega, but was less successful in competition.
15. Mercury Zephyr
Ford Motor Company used the name of the gentle westerly wind for the third and final time in the 1978 to 1983 model years.
This Zephyr was the Mercury division’s counterpart to the Ford Fairmont, which was in production for the same length of time.
Both were based on the then-new rear-wheel-drive Fox platform, whose life extended into the 21st century.
Several changes were made, of course, but the fourth-generation Mustang, which survived into the 2004 model year, was at least partly related to the Zephyr of more than two decades earlier.
16. Nissan Mistral
Maserati doesn’t seem to have minded other manufacturers using the same wind names for their models, though to be fair it would have been difficult to confuse its 1960s Mistral with the vehicle later produced by Nissan.
This compact SUV was only ever built at the Nissan factory in Zona Franca, Barcelona, and was sold in Europe as either the Nissan Terrano II (pictured) or the Ford Maverick.
It was also sold in Japan as the Mistral, a name which must have sounded much more exotic there than it does in southern Europe.
Whatever it was called, it was never manufactured in Japan, so this was a rare case of a vehicle having to be imported into its home market from a factory located several thousands of miles away.
17. Pagani Zonda
The Zonda supercar made its first public appearance at the Geneva motor show in 1999.
It was named after an appropriately powerful wind often found in company founder Horacio Pagani’s home country, Argentina.
The zonda is classified as a foehn, now a generic term but originally the name of a specific wind in the Alpine region.
Foehn winds are found on the leeward side of mountains (the Andes in the case of the zonda), and are characteristically warm and dry.
18. Pontiac Tempest
Like a cyclone, a tempest is not specifically a wind, but an atmospheric event in which wind features strongly.
Pontiac used the name for a new compact car introduced in the 1961 model year.
Versions of the next two generations, produced from 1964 to 1970, were larger, and in some cases powered by V8 engines with capacities of more than 6 liters.
The final Tempest was a Pontiac-badged Chevrolet Corsica, a front-wheel-drive, compact car of the 1980s and 1990s which could not be described as tempestuous without a great deal of imagination.
19. Tornado Typhoon
Predating the GMC Typhoon by more than 40 years, this British sports car was notable for being named after two different types of circulating air.
A typhoon, as noted before, is a type of cyclone, while a tornado is a rapidly spinning column of air between the ground and the base of a storm cloud.
The Tornado Typhoon used Ford mechanicals, and had a production run in the low hundreds.
Later models called Tempest and Thunderbolt were less successful.
20. Volkswagen Bora
In another example of a manufacturer employing a name previously used by Maserati, Volkswagen introduced the Bora in 1999.
The car was identical to the fourth-generation Golf in almost every respect, other than the fact that it had a sedan rather than a hatchback body.
Oddly, there were structurally identical station-wagon versions of both the Golf and the Bora, the latter differing from the former only in that it had different front-end styling and a higher level of standard equipment.
The regular Bora was the only Golf sedan derivative to use the name, but VW has taken inspiration from other winds for similar models, as will soon become apparent.
21. Volkswagen Jetta
With occasional exceptions, most Volkswagen sedans derived from the Golf have been named Jetta.
Production of the original model began in 1979, five years after the launch of the Golf hatchback.
According to Volkswagen, the name is derived from ‘jet stream’, of which there are several on Earth and other planets in the Solar System, and presumably yet more planets elsewhere.
Jet streams are not normally referred to as winds because they occur too high in the atmosphere for us to experience them directly at ground level, but they are certainly air currents which, for our purposes, is close enough.
22. Volkswagen Passat
Since 1973, VW has used the Passat name for its large family car.
There is no wind called passat, but Passatwind is the German word for ‘trade wind’, and that’s where the car’s name comes from.
Trade winds are part of a global atmospheric cycle, flowing from east to west and towards the equator in each hemisphere.
They then turn round and become westerlies, flowing in the other direction and away from the equator for a while before the cycle starts again.
23. Volkswagen Scirocco
The sirocco is a hot, dusty wind which blows northwards through Africa towards the Mediterranean.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same wind as the ghibli, which we were talking about earlier.
For most coupe versions of the Golf (other than the Corrado), Volkswagen has used the Italian form of the name, scirocco, even though in German it’s called Schirokko.
In conversation, this makes very little difference, since the two words are pronounced almost identically in those languages.
24. Volkswagen Vento
We’ve already encountered Golf-based sedans called Jetta and Bora, but the third-generation car, on sale during the 1990s, was known as Vento.
As with Passat, there is no wind called vento – the word simply means ‘wind’ in both Italian and Portuguese.
In other words, while several cars have been named after specific winds, Volkswagen broadened the field considerably by naming this one after wind in general.
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