In a guest post for Duets Blog, I look at one of the most popular and persistent of all naming myths: the one about the Chevrolet Nova. The car hasn’t been produced since 1988, but the story about how the Nova name “failed” in Spanish-speaking countries—because it means “no go,” according to the legend—lives on.
Guess what? “Nova” isn’t “no va,” and the Nova sold well in Latin America.
Read the post to learn more about the “Nova” myth and why it has proved so surprisingly durable.
Some of my other guest posts for Duets Blog: white elephants, the Aveda trademark, Los Doyers, Festivus.
It seems to me that people are ready to believe the worst of General Motors, no matter what the circumstances. It was true back in the Sixties, when GM was supposedly trying to keep its market share just short of 50 percent to keep the antitrust machine at bay, and it's certainly true now, with a couple of Volts catching fire and becoming a national punchline. (A whole run of Escapes is being recalled over fire fears, but Ford is not Government Motors, so no one whines about Ford.) Disclosure: my first car was a Nova. It went just fine. So did the one we bought after our first child.
Posted by: CGHill | July 24, 2012 at 11:00 PM