Opinion Piece: What's In A Name?

I doubt there would be an adult in the entire UK who can't picture a Capri. Certainly, everyone is likely to think of a different Capri; maybe it's Doyle and Bodie swinging a MkIII around the streets of London, maybe it’s a Zakspeed Group 5 monster, maybe a relative had one, or maybe it was Del Boy in the ‘Pratmobile’. Whatever comes to mind, it’s clear to you what a Capri looks like. A two-door, sports coupe, with styling cues that hint toward both American muscle and European rally stages. That same idea of a car, with the same long bonnet, squat rear, rear set cabin as the American Mustang or the Italian Montreal but availabe at a price to suit the budget of the blue collar meant the Capri found fans and owners both at home and away. The first round of the now iconic car saw production across five countries, each producing a twist on the car to suit a different market. It was a car that fast found favour with the buying public. And that favour has lasted long beyond its production: people have made loving, modern re-imaginings for decades, be it through digital renderings, hand drawings or even Ford themselves making the Visos concept car, a car that harkened back strongly to the original shape of the Capri.

So with the scene set for how culturally known the Capri name is and what it means to people, wouldn't you be glad to know that Ford are bringing it back! Autocar even recently got a spy shot of the new concept in testing, and with full credit to them for this photo, here it is:

And, oh dear. That name so heavily associated with a two-door, sporty coupe has suddenly become associated with a tall, ungainly looking, 4 door coupe crossover, that doesn't harken back to the design of the original Capri at all. It’s not the first time Ford has done this in recent years either, with the Mustang Mach-E and the Puma also being crossover SUVs with names taken from cars with far sportier origins, so what's going on here? There can be a number of reasons, with the Mach-E, Ford was unveiling a new EV SUV to compete with Tesla, and regardless of anyone's opinions on Tesla and its lack of quality control, or crackpot owner, it is an indisputable fact that the brand is popular. Teslas are fast becoming ubiquitous, and the brand has a strong social cache. So it makes sense for Ford to use the Mustang brand to try and improve the sales. The Mustang is still available in its traditional guise too, the Mach-e is a separate car, so there is a fair amount of sense behind that corporate decision. Far from the only time such an idea has been used either, even within Ford. Then there's the Puma:

The Puma was a 3 door sports coupe based on the Ford Fiesta that existed in the late '90s through to the early 2000s. It existed for one generation, it didn't sell all that amazingly, and it was gone from showrooms entirely within 5 years of release. You'd be forgiven for never having heard of it, even if it does have a bit of a cult following within the car community. Come the late 2010s, the Blue Oval needed a name for their next small crossover, the one that’s not quite as small as the EcoSport, but not as big as a Kuga; itself loosely stealing its name from the previously released yet not so fondly remembered Cougar. From a corporate standpoint, it makes a huge amount of sense in a financial way. It is expensive to come up with a new name for a car, and it is entirely possible to get the expensive process of finding a new name for a car disastrously wrong, a lesson Ford learned the exceptionally hard way with the Edsel. You could even bank on the nostalgia held for the name by its original target audience, who perhaps reminisce over their old one 'from back in the day' or were too young, poor or busy having children to buy one back then, who can finally enjoy owning one now, even if it no longer the nimble little pocket rocket with a Yamaha tuned engine it used to be. A name can carry weight and sometimes, when you market it right, a name can carry that weight to the showroom, where it counts. Ford is, of course, not even the only ones to do this, with even Mitsubishi giving us the Eclipse Cross, using the name garnered from the original ‘90s Eclipse. At least, that's the intent, but to my eyes, this concept sparks either a lack of confidence or a lack of care in the new car. To me, it says you were pushing it out of the door quickly and either didn't care enough about it to give it a new name, because all it's meant to do is add extra names in the lineup and maybe sell a few thousand a year, as all manufacturers now seem to be going with the Netflix method of putting as many names in their lists as possible in the hope that the sheer volume of options must mean they will catch more people with ever more specific niches, or you simply lacked the confidence that the car was going to last more than 5 years before dying off, so why bother with the expense of a new name?

Worse still, it does seem to be a complete lack of pride in the heritage of the names they've used. Not a single time in any of the Puma's advertising that I've seen since its release has even the tiniest bit of lip service been paid to the original Puma. Contrast this with the current Clio advert where, despite the fact the Clio they're advertising isn't the hot version and its proudest boast is its MPG, the advert is wall to wall with the hot Clio's of the past. It just shares a name with the Clio Williams, the Clio V6, the Clio RS, but the French are clearly very proud of that lineage, the advertising is centred around it being the latest entry in that family tree. Ford? Not even a brief glimpse, it feels odd. I'd understand if they re-used the name from a car from 1950 that failed, but I've been alive longer than the Puma has been dead, it feels a bit odd to not even glimpse at it once in an advert. It appears evident that they saw the name's ability to bring potential customers to the door banking off the nostalgia of that original target market and decided 'nah, that sounds like effort'.

The new Capri looks to be an even stronger version of that because the original Capri really wasn't obscure at all. I will stress here, I'm not a major lover of the original Capri. I understand the appeal but it doesn't do anything for me; at the very least I can acknowledge its historic success in motorsport, the numerous pop culture uses in TV, the fact that most people over the age of 35 seem to have known at least one person who had one, and I just don't see how that history can at all marry up with a fourth crossover SUV in a range of only seven cars. In an age where we are both trying to give the internal combustion engine a glorious send off and sell an EV future to demographics who take absolutely no interest in EVs, the Capri name could so much better be utilised for the brand image. Give Ford a new, cheap, fun to drive sports car, whether by developing one off of Ford's own back or merely rebadging a different company's car. Fiat did this to great success with the 124, giving Mazda's MX5 a pretty new shell, harkening back to the 124 Spider of old. Toyota did this with the Supra to great success, co-developing the Supra with BMW's Z4. It brings the costs down substantially and you get to show the world your fancy new sports car. It wouldn't even need to be that good to drive, I'm fairly confident in saying a decently priced 2 door coupe with rear wheel drive and some lettering on the back spelling out the word 'Capri' will sell happily. Alternatively, encourage the people who've long protested ever buying an EV by offering them a 2 door coupe with some electric motors underneath and some fantastic styling on top. This method has worked well for General Motors, with them debuting the new Hummer as an EV, and it appealing to its original market well, even if they are often sworn gas guzzlers. VW has done it with the ID Buzz, giving the hippie types a new, great looking free love van to cart the kids round in. It's also worked exceptionally well for previously mentioned lovers of heritage, Renault, who gave us a truly sensational looking EV Renault 5 concept, based on the original 5 Turbo. Even I, a person with petrol in their veins, get hot and flustered thinking about the new 5, both through how ungodly well it is styled and how much I love and adore the original. How many of you have an older male in your family (or are one yourself) that regularly preaches how terrible EVs are and how they'll never consider one and how they'll pump petrol forever that you know full well would immediately soften if Ford dropped an EV that strongly harkened back to the original Capri and said 'here you go, you can buy a new Capri, just like you always wanted. It's got sex appeal and it pulls off REALLY fast”? Even if they would tell you up and down “nope, no its an EV its terrible” you can see in their eyes that they secretly love it. Many petrolheads don't care for EVs and a huge part of that is that they just aren't sexy, almost every EV we've been given seems to just be a white good, an appliance, but the drivetrain of an EV is just a skateboard filled with batteries, within reason you could give the people any body you want, and because you've less physical restrictions than an ICE car one what needs to fit where, you've got more artistic freedom. Take the Mustang Mach-E skateboard and put a Capri shape on top, print money. Other companies are starting to cotton on to this notion, why can't Ford?

Perhaps I'm just annoyed over nothing here. The Puma has not struggled to sell and is, by all accounts, seemingly a decent car for everyday use. Perhaps the population as a whole, doesn’t care that much about the heritage of any given name on a car, because to the average person, a car is just an appliance. I'd like to wish Ford would fail horrendously with this, both because of the egregious use of the Capri name, and also because the car looks sacrilegiously ugly from what we've seen so far, and I want them to suffer for having caused such profound damage to my eyes for having witnessed it. However it’s 2023 and seemingly all anyone wants to buy now is just more and more of these endlessly boring yet endlessly prevalent crossover SUVs, so knowing that, they'll likely sell by the millions, and we will all just have to accept the Capri's history means nothing more than saving some money on a spreadsheet. And maybe slapping the nostalgia button by throwing an old badge from the past on their latest crossover will drag older, more SUV-sceptic buyers to the showrooms. It certainly hasn't slowed the Mustang Mach-E's sales, and the Puma is currently the UK's best selling car, taking up the place where the Fiesta so happily sat for many a decade. Maybe the Capri will follow the Puma and at least offer an engaging drive so some questionably moustached copper might crash it through a suspiciously stacked pile of empty cardboard boxes whilst chasing down some wrong 'uns, but even if it does, its as a car lover that I find it quite difficult not to see this egregious use of the name as both frustrating and sad.