A very long time ago my mate owned a phase one renault 5 turbo....drove it round town like a maniac (spun the wheels wheels out til the tyres blew...(this was a friday night, downtown, Bristol....) drove it home on flat tyres, couldnt get any tyres the next day and had to come down in his Girlfriends car - a shit fiat 127 but as they (the garages used to do to shift old stock) - put some shit sticker kit on it - which his girlfriends had....a Fiat Bambino.
And lighter wheels for it would have been sold as bongo mags. Appropriately enough, Bongos also have a pop-up part that you can erect at nighttime.
Opel Ascona Hyundai Kona Anyone who speaks Portugese knows why. In fact the Kona is called the Kauai in Portugal.
to be fair I have a Skoda Superb 4x4 DSG and it’s a great car. but wtf is Honda Blackbird all about? on the flip side a Hayabusa is a Japanese bird of prey which eats Blackbirds
Ha! I forgotten you’d told me you had one of those Still, I’ll distract attention away from my faux pas by nominating à further Mitsubishi, namely the Mitsubishi Minica Lettuce
The Countach name originated in late 1970 or 1971, near the beginning of the LP112 project.[9][10] Most previous and subsequent Lamborghini car names are associated with famous bulls and bullfighting, but the Countach broke with this tradition. The name originated from the word contacc (pronounced [kʊŋˈtɑtʃ]), an exclamation of astonishment in the Piedmontese language.[11] Marcello Gandini, the designer of the Countach, explained the origin of the name: When we made cars for the car shows, we worked at night and we were all tired, so we would joke around to keep our morale up. There was a profiler working with us who made the locks. He was two meters tall with two enormous hands, and he performed all the little jobs. He spoke almost only Piedmontese, didn’t even speak Italian. Piedmontese is much different from Italian and sounds like French. One of his most frequent exclamations was ‘countach’, which literally means plague, contagion, and is actually used more to express amazement or even admiration, like ‘goodness’. He had this habit. When we were working at night, to keep our morale up, there was a jousting spirit, so I said we could call it Countach, just as a joke, to say an exaggerated quip, without any conviction. There nearby was Bob Wallace, who assembled the mechanics—we always made the cars operational. At that time you could even roll into the car shows with the car running, which was marvelous. So jokingly I asked Bob Wallace how it sounded to an Anglo-Saxon ear. He said it in his own way, strangely. It worked. We immediately came up with the writing and stuck it on. But maybe the real suggestion was the idea of one of my co-workers, a young man who said let’s call it that. That is how the name was coined. This is the only true story behind this word. — Marcello Gandini, Not Just Bulls: the Creator Tells Us the Story Behind the Name Countach
women carry babies before birth hence where the convention for calling vehicles and ships she originated. For me though it’s daft and they’re just inanimate objects that are an ‘it’.
I’ve never really thought about it but have generally called my bikes a “she” In my case I would think it comes from my interest in ships. Military shipping is always given the female form because it was originally believed that the “mother” would protect those aboard. The one notable historic exception was the Bismarck which because of its pure brute power was called a “he” Maybe it just translated down over the years to all transport machinery?
