Blunder Buses: Mercedes Vaneo

One of the key ambitions for the creators of this unusual high-roofed MPV was to distance it from the idea that it might be a van. ‘So,’ explained the team from Germany presenting their new baby to the management of Mercedes-Benz UK, ‘we have decided to call it Vaneo’.

‘I’m afraid we all laughed,’ says Bryan Smart, then the Chief Financial Officer of Mercedes-Benz UK. ‘But they were not for changing it.’ The German team explained that the name was to be pronounced V-ah-Neo rather than ‘Van-E-O’, as any Brit reading this script on the back of a vehicle would.

Still, never mind the niceties of pronunciation. If you don’t want an object to be identified by the name of said undesirable object, it’s probably not a good idea to use that word as the first syllable of the name of the new object, particularly if you want people to think about it in a different way. Germany remained heroically undeterred: Vaneo it was.