General Motors was a very different company in the 1990s. This was the General Motors behind the innovations found at Saturn and baked into the EV1. GM’s brands also emerged from the malaise of the 1980s by putting horses back under power barns and attempting hot and fun compacts. One of the bright spots in GM’s radical 1990s was the Chevrolet Beretta, a car that many have forgotten but is still pretty awesome, even today. Much ink has been spilled about the Beretta itself, but not a whole lot about its name. See, Beretta is also the name of a gun brand, and Chevy naming a car after it caused an interesting lawsuit that was eventually resolved with a symbolic trade of a car for a rifle and a shotgun.
Naming a car is no easy walk in the park. Automakers go through an intense process involving several departments from marketing and design to communications and legal. Massive teams of talented people sift through market research and even consumer-suggested names to find the right feelings and imagery that they want to evoke for their vehicle. These people also go through painstaking work to make sure the names they choose don’t have negative connotations in the markets where the vehicle will be sold.
The naming process of a car is fascinating, and as Consumer Reports once noted, it’s why we got the 1955 Ford Thunderbird and not the Ford Hep Cat, which was really one of 5,000 names under consideration for the personal luxury coupe.
Getting it wrong can be disastrous. Who hasn’t heard the legend about the Chevy Nova failing to sell in Spanish-speaking countries because “no va” means “no go?” Reputable car sites have repeated it, and I still hear prominent YouTubers make the claim today. But here’s the dirty truth. That was always a myth. If you can speak the language, you will know that “nova” and “no va” are not the same. Regardless, the Nova actually sold well in Spanish-speaking countries. So, even if some people did think the Nova “didn’t go,” clearly not enough people actually cared.
Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t examples of bad names out there. The Studebaker Dictator was a wonderful little ride when it debuted in 1927. As Mac’s Motor City Garage writes, Studebaker marketed the Dictator as a car that would “dictate the standards” of the mid-priced field. By all accounts, the Dictator was also a fine car, and one that would be a sweet classic to own today. I mean, their style was fantastic, and they were built featuring L-head straight-sixes and a straight-eight.
Studebaker discontinued the Dictator name in 1938, and while the automaker didn’t give a reason, automotive historians have pointed out that it’s not too hard to connect the dots given what was happening in the rest of the world at the time.
But even if you make sure you don’t piss off or confuse the public, you still need to make sure you aren’t upsetting other companies. Automaker legal departments take trademarks seriously, and if another company owns the name that the automaker wants to use for its car, action must be taken. An example reported by Consumer Reports is the time when the Ford Mustang was originally sold in West Germany as the Ford T-5 because an industrial equipment company owned the trademark to Mustang in the region.
Some automakers will get around this by giving their cars entirely made-up names or names based on winds, waters, and other natural phenomena. Other times, automakers may find themselves embroiled in a lawsuit after unexpectedly ruffling the feathers of a company serving a completely different market. That’s what happened with the Chevrolet Beretta, and the story is almost as fascinating as the car itself.
Named Like A Gun
Two years ago, I found a perfect, 45-mile Chevrolet Beretta at the Volo Auto Museum here in Illinois. I was shocked because, at the time, I wasn’t even able to remember the last time I had even seen a Beretta, let alone one that still had its paint and bumpers. Truth be told, that 2023 sighting of the Beretta was the first and the last time I had seen one in a while. I don’t even remember a Beretta showing up for last year’s epic Galpin car show.
That’s sad because the Beretta remains an awesome mark in GM history, from my previous coverage:
The Beretta was a product of a struggling General Motors. As I explained in the retrospective on the Lumina Z34, the 1980s were not kind to the General. Ford launched its Taurus in 1986 and GM just didn’t have a worthy competitor. The Taurus looked like it came from the future while the Chevy Monte Carlo and the Chevy Celebrity were stuck firmly in the 1980s. In 1982, GM started development on the GM-10 program. This $7 billion program was intended to replace the Chevrolet Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Buick Century.
General Motors was reorganized in 1984. The GM-10 program marched forward, and suddenly, its importance grew. As CNN explains, GM held 44.6 percent of the car market in 1984. However, public interest in GM products waned, and by the GM-10 program’s debut in 1987, GM’s share had shrunken to 36.6 percent. As was reported at the time, GM made a bet on the bad times of the 1970s continuing into the 1980s. Thus, its cars were smaller, traded power for fuel efficiency, and relied heavily on front drive platforms. Unfortunately for GM, things got cheap again, and buyers weren’t as interested in GM’s penny-pinching strategies.
GM’s plan to get back on top was to flood the market with new models. My retrospective continues:
As the Chicago Tribune reported in 1987, General Motors was also developing a replacement for the maligned Citation. The N platform was Oldsmobile’s replacement for the X platform while the L platform was Chevrolet’s equivalent of the same. In 1987, Chevy’s L-body Corsica sedan was launched to fight a lengthy list of competitors including the Dodge Aries, Ford Tempo, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Nissan Stanza, Mazda 626, Plymouth Reliant, and Mercury Topaz. GM projected sales of 600,000 units over 18 months.
The Corsica would have a platform mate in the form of the sporty Beretta two-door coupe. According to the Chicago Tribune, the Beretta’s foes were fierce and included the Acura Integra, Chrysler LeBaron, Ford Mustang, Toyota Celica, and the Nissan Pulsar NX. The newspaper also saw the Beretta bumping up against GM’s own Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, Chevy Camaro, and Pontiac Grand Am. My mind is a bit blown at the idea of the Beretta being seen on the same level as a Mustang. The Beretta and Corsica also had to convince buyers to step up from smaller compacts while getting people to forget the Citation.
Design of the Beretta was performed in the same GM design house behind the Camaro, Corvette, Monte Carlo, Cavalier, and Corsica. Overseeing the design was Irvin Rybicki, who led GM’s downsizing plans through the 1980s. Rybicki rose from chief designer in the 1960s to eventually taking over vice president of design in 1977, taking the position that was held by Bill Mitchell. From a design perspective, the Beretta was a step forward for GM. The vehicle’s lighting was better integrated with the sleek body and those metal panels were galvanized to help battle rust.
As noted above, the Beretta and the Corsica had a lot sitting on their shoulders. GM desperately needed to get out of its slump, and the only way to achieve that was by getting people into dealerships. Thankfully, GM got its recipe right this time. Buyers and reviewers found the Beretta to be a perfectly fine, affordable sports coupe.
Chevy even produced some actual holy grail-level Berettas with the likes of the performance-minded GTZ, GTU, and Z26. At its hottest, the Beretta was available with a Quad 4 inline four good for 180 HP and 160 lb-ft of torque, which allowed a five-speed manual-equipped Beretta to hit 60 mph in around 7.6 seconds. That was legitimately quick for a cheap coupe back then! The Beretta even came with V6 power if that tickled your fancy better.
What’s In A Name
In 1988, the first full year of Beretta production, Chevy managed to move 275,098 units. The Beretta was a hit, and GM was feeling good about its future. But it wasn’t out of the woods yet.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, in 1986, Fabbrica D’Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A. caught wind that Chevrolet was launching a car called the Beretta. That year, the arms manufacturer’s legal team warned General Motors that its new car would be in conflict with its trademark. The 500-year-old company had registered its Beretta trademark here in America back in 1954. While it’s unlikely that consumers would confuse shotguns, handguns, and technical vests for a front-wheel-drive Chevy, Beretta took this very seriously.
It’s not explained exactly why GM didn’t heed the warning or how this situation was somehow deemed acceptable in the first place, but GM launched the Beretta anyway. Beretta, the gun manufacturer, followed through on its warning in 1987 and sued General Motors in a U.S. District Court in New York.
The Chicago Tribune reported on just how upset Beretta was:
An Italian gunmaker named Beretta sued GM because the automaker markets a car called the Chevrolet Beretta. The Italian firearms maker had the name first, about 460 years before GM decided to use it. Though it`s unlikely that a vehicle used for a special Saturday night might be confused with a Saturday Night Special, Beretta says the issue goes deeper.
Beretta charges GM is ”guilty of unfair competition,” though you`ll be hard-pressed to find too many Chevy dealers who`ve had to turn away disappointed customers looking for a semiautomatic or too many gunshop owners asked to ”Bring out the one with the V-6.”
Of course, you can imagine the dismay among potential buyers of gun or car when they mistakenly go to the wrong store and ask for one ”fully loaded.” The suit also asks Beretta, the gun folks, be compensated for ”related losses, including reputational damage to Beretta.”
Surely, You Can’t Be Serious?
As you saw above, there was a lot of joking around going on as well. Car and Driver even published a mock “road test” comparison between the Beretta car and a Beretta handgun. The Chicago Tribune couldn’t help itself:
Perhaps the Beretta folks think that the next time GM announces a Beretta recall, owners will head for their holsters rather than their garages and bring back the wrong product for repair. In announcing the suit, which was filed last week in federal district court in New York, the Beretta gun people expressed concern ”about potential negative connotations should the GM Beretta car develop a history of quality control problems.”
Beretta seems concerned that baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet have gotten in the way of 9-mm., .45-caliber, double-barreled and repeat-action firing. Forget ”The heartbeat of America” and bring on a target. The Beretta gun crew says it has a reputation to preserve. ”No other gunmaker has won more gold medals and awards in Olympic competition,” argued Robert Bonaventure, general manager of Beretta`s U.S. affiliate when reached by phone.
He does have a point. Beretta couldn`t even win one of those ad campaign awards the buff books disguise as ”car of the year.” And when it comes to Olympic spirit, most U.S. teams usually have Japanese carmakers as their sponsor. Perhaps Beretta fears the problems GM has had to bear will stand in the way of people`s right to bear arms engraved with the Beretta nameplate.
It gets even more hilarious because Bonaventure did explain why he thought people would somehow confuse the two very different Berettas, from a different Chicago Tribune story:
”People like you who don`t know Beretta is a gun will see the ads for the Chevy Beretta and someday go into a shop to purchase a gun, see the name Beretta and say, `When did GM start making guns?` ” he said.
A Beretta For A Beretta
While seemingly everyone was laughing about this, Beretta didn’t think it was funny and wanted $250 million ($703,783,010 today) from General Motors. In the end, the suit settled on positive terms for everyone. General Motors agreed to pay $500,000 ($1,437,945 today) to the Beretta Foundation for Cancer Research. As part of the settlement, GM was allowed to continue using the Beretta name as long as GM acknowledged the gun manufacturer in its documentation on the vehicle.
“We are satisfied that the result of this agreement will be to help fight a disease that causes victims in all countries,” said Pier Giuseppe Beretta – Chairman of Fabbrica d’Armi Pietro Beretta
There was also a symbolic trade as part of the settlement, too. GM Chairman Roger Smith traded a Chevy Beretta GTU in exchange for a Beretta rifle and a shotgun. At the time, the car was worth $15,610 ($44,892 today), and it was reported that Beretta’s arms ran up to $15,000 as well. Sadly, it wasn’t reported what the value of the two guns was, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.
In the end, Chevrolet built just under a million Berettas over a nine-year production run. So, paying off Beretta was probably worth it. This case is also a good example of how just operating in an entirely different market might not be enough to stave off a trademark infringement lawsuit. At the very least, it looks like everyone had a ton of fun in this instance. Though this does make me wonder. Has anyone somehow managed to confuse Beretta guns with General Motors?
I’m going to say that there is a better than zero chance those two guns are worth more than the car today
All that effort put into naming new models, and people still come up with stuff like “bz4x.”
Owned a (Chevy) Beretta in the 90s and still fondly remember it. It ended up being positioned (in reality, not GM’s fantasies) as a sorta uplevel sport coupe if the Cavalier or Sunbird was too coarse for your tastes. She was fun to drive, handled well for what she was, and I’ll always remember how the seats were of shockingly high quality for something at that level.
IIRC, part of GM’s lame legal defense was that it derived that name from its use of “Berlinetta” as a Camaro trim level. Nice try, but not exactly the Cobra defense that Ford used to battle Carroll Shelby to a draw.
If memory serves, the German Mustang trademark was for lawn mowers. (That assumes the article I read was accurate, and complete – industrial machinery would definitely cover lawn mowers.)
As for the lawsuit, Beretta S.P.A. was right to sue. GM leveraged the Beretta name to market the car – even though most people (especially back then) had no idea what Beretta was, enough people did that it caused the story to go whatever the ’80s version of “viral” was. GM got a ton of free marketing out of the deal.
And, dare I say, the cars weren’t of the same caliber (apologies to Dodge) as the guns.
I’m a fan of Beretta firearms, and despite my general dislike for GM products, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Chevy Beretta as well, but somehow this was all new information for me.
I wonder what the Italians did with that Beretta?
If Ford had chosen their back-pocket “option #2” of building a FWD Mustang (which essentially went on to be the Ford Probe), the Beretta absolutely would have been a direct Mustang competitor.
Now just imagine one of the Bishop’s alternate futures, where the Beretta and a FWD Mustang squared off in market competition — and what that might have brought to car enthusiasts on both sides. Fun food for thought.
Always nice to see mid-to-late 80s and early 90s GM cars getting some love. GM was determined to haul themselves out of the Malaise Era and their initial early-80s missteps, and put out a whole range of car-of-the-future-now designs. Unfortunately for many buyers, the full experience was often costly to buy in the upmarket trims, or limited in output by margin-conscious management. So buyers and onlookers tended to see more of the lowest-common-denominator models roll off the lot with boring, droning Iron Duke power, substandard tires, and bland trim. Because GM management. *Sigh*.
I’ve always liked most of GM’s styling from that era. Aero shapes, but generally with some nicely sculpted edges. The first-generation Taurus was attractive, but it and everything else Ford designed seemed to get blander with time. The 1983-85 T-bird and the Merkur XR4Ti(Sierra) were some of Ford’s best head-turners in the US in the early 80s. After that, they started to slide too far into the droopy melted-bar-of-soap look. Or half-hearted rounded boxes like the Tempo/Topaz.
Ford seems to alternate between “edgy” and “good neighbor” with its designs. The first gen of whatever is often striking, but then that gets toned down in the second/the refresh. If the vehicle makes it to the third gen, it often gets head-turning (or at least more spicy) design again. Wash rinse repeat until the model gets waxed.
I remember in the late 90s every barretta I saw was already mostly made of rust to a degree that they stood out as rusty to me even against their contemporaries. The one preserved in a museum may have only escaped a rusty fate by being in climate control.
By the late 90s and early 2000s, it seemed like every GM car model from the previous mid-80s to early-90s generations were getting scruffy.
My experience from owning one was that supplies of model-specific parts were getting spotty. Plus there were numerous running changes over those years to add complexity. For all but generic parts used all the way into current models, GM was leaning into the “after 10 years for a model, they don’t have to provide parts support” practice. And they certainly weren’t encouraging the aftermarket suppliers to take up the slack.
My impression was the newest iteration of GM management wanted those cars off the road. They wanted buyers to ditch what should have been perfectly repairable cars and get into… the poorer-quality offerings GM was foisting onto the market by then. Yet they were killing Saturn and Oldsmobile. Pontiac was getting pushed out to pasture. The Beretta was gone, the Corsica replaced by increasingly inferior Malibu models, culminating in the Vectra-based version that virtually no one liked. The FWD Impala was getting little love and was increasingly pushed into fleet sales. Buick was starting to be propped up mainly to grow its brand for export to China. Cadillac was squarely in the midst of an identity crisis. They settled on decent, moneymaking trucks and SUVs. And built up the
tarted-up Chevy TahoeEscalade’s identity and market share. Not GM’s finest hour.I forgot about them and haven’t seen any in decades. I do wonder how many barrettas had a trunk full of barrettas in the mid 90s. There was a batretta plant in southern Maryland lots of Chevy barrettas in southern Maryland too always thought that was amusing. It was the ultimate smib car.
I worked with a degenerate that asked me one day if I wanted to buy a Beretta and my first thought was, “I don’t want a gun from him.” He then clarified it was a car and I was even less inclined to buy a car from him.
There’s another very good reason for Beretta to go after GM for trademark infringement. If you don’t defend a trademark when it’s threatened, it can be viewed as abandoning the trademark. Another gun manufacturer could have started calling their guns Beretta, and while they most certainly would have been sued, had they just rolled over for GM they could have lost their case against the infringing gun.
That’s a great point! I wonder if that was the real reason why Beretta did this, because the public-facing explanation is sort of hilarious. Clearly, journalists of the ’80s thought so, too.
I think it’s the same reason that Jeep went so hard after Mahindra brought the Roxor. Which on the surface was pretty ridiculous.
I guess the letter Beretta sent to GM warning them must have been a blank one.
Seems like Beretta’s lawyers had some real ammo against GM. They had no silencer during the court proceedings.
Beretta must’ve been real heated about this, like a. smoking gun (hot to the touch.)
I’m sure the automotive magazines of the time loved writing about this.
All I read is typical GM arrogance.
Couldn’t possibly have named it “Baretta” after the TV character who drove a blue ’66 Impala…
…much less “Corsica Coupe” tho, could they?
Always liked Corsica as a name. I enjoy when domestics try to impart that yur-o-pee-en flavor to their offerings. It’s silly but endearing.
My wife inherited a Corsica when she got her driver’s license at 16. She was almost 30 when she finally bought her first new car (’06 Mazda 3). She still talks about how great the Corsica was. And the 3 too. She bought that right before we met. It was great.