You want to know something I appreciate? I mean, aside from the transistor and our nation’s remarkably competent network of municipal water systems and being hugged from behind while doing dishes? Punctuation. Yes, punctuation, those little dots and dashes and squiggles that are traffic signals of our written language. Generally, punctuation isn’t particularly common in car names, largely because car names tend to be single words (occasionally there’s doubles or triples, sure) and not whole sentences, so the need for punctuation is significantly reduced.
Of course, while it isn’t common, it’s not like it’s unheard of, either! There are some cars that incorporate punctuation into their names, and I think we’d all be better off if we know what they are. We should probably establish some ground rules, though. For example, I’m not sure hyphens should count, because there would just be too many. If we count both manufacturer and model names with hyphens, off the top of my head I can think of Karmann-Ghia, Willys-Overland, Pierce-Arrow, Kaiser-Frazer, Dual-Ghia, Gordon-Keeble, and there’s many more. I think a hyphen is too easy. So, we’ll say no hyphens.


Wait, so what are the accepted set of punctuation marks, at least for English? It seems there are 16 of them: period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, em dash, en dash, hyphen, parentheses, curly brackets, square brackets, apostrophe, double quotation marks, single quotation marks, and ellipsis. So, of these, I think we can lose all they hyphen-like ones (em and en dashes, hyphens). The rest I think are okay.

I think I’m okay with some other typographic symbols being counted as punctuation, like pound sign/number sign/hashtag or slashes like the ones I just used there or even an ampersand, if it’s actually used officially and not just a substitute for “and” because you’re feeling lazy.
So, with these parameters in mind, let’s see what we can come up with:
Volkswagen Up!
Volkswagen ID.3
Volkswagen ID.4
Volkswagen ID.Buzz
Honda That’s
Th!nk City
Smart #1
Smart #3
Fiat X1/9
Alldays & Onions
Kia Cee’d
That’s not even a dozen! Yes, the list goes to 11, but there have to be more, right? I think? If any crew can come up with some that I missed, it’s this one. There’s got to be more; what are they?
Oh wait! I thought of one more, a good one, from the really, really early days of cars:
Bollée L’Obéissante
This was an 1873 steam car from French automotive pioneer Amédée Bollée!

And, yes, that is absolutely an automobile, pre-dating the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which was not, despite what Mercedes-Benz likes to claim, the first automobile. Not even close.
There must be more! I just checked Coupe de Ville and Sedan de Ville, by the way, they don’t use apostrophes. And I’m not counting concept, just production cars (and yes, it’s believed the Bollée was built in series! I can’t recall how many, though), so no Chrysler D’Elegances, sorry.
But I know there have to be more!
Umm. Any car can have a possessive apostrophe: my car’s wheels are round. My corvette’s engine is a rebuild. My Ferrari’s wreckage sold for $300.
The possessive apostrophe probably should have gotten a shoutout that it doesn’t count.