Naming Your Baby After A Car? Here’s The Most Popular Choices

How often do people name their children after cars?

Given the breadth of creativity applied to children of the 21st century, I thought this was a question worth investigating. To find out, I analyzed the 33,044 names registered for newborns in 2014 with the U.S. Social Security Administration. To get on the list, a name has to be used a minimum of five times. (The most popular name for a girl, “Emma,” was given 20,799 times last year.)

First, I looked for names that were also car brands. Obviously, some brand were named after people at their inception — Lincoln, Mercedes — and there were several others that would be coincidental if they showed up. But I was still curious about how much overlap there would be. Here’s the answer:

I was surprised the list was as long as it is. Some of these words — Audi, Infiniti and Kia, for example — didn’t really exist in our culture before the automaker came along. Chevy can claim another victory over Ford, at least for 2014, although it’s close. And I don’t really know what to think about boys named Jaguar.

Naming your child after an automotive inspiration turns out to be a decades-old trend. Laura Wattenberg, founder of BabyNameWizard.com and an inveterate watcher of the data in spawn signifiers, says the first burst of car-related naming began in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when mothers started moving further away from relatives and no longer put their relatives’ names on their offspring. Names like “Pearl” and “Golden” became popular for their intonations of luxury and value — and along with them, “Royce,” after the Rolls-Royces driven by the powerful.