They Should’ve Run Out of Names, Already
With all the new models of cars, SUVs and trucks that have been introduced lately, I’m surprised they haven’t run out of names.
I wonder if the various vehicle manufacturers have committees just for naming new models?
Dodge has de facto reserved the ‘D’ models: Durango, Daytona, Dakota, etc. and Toyota has its Tundra and Tacoma (even though I think it should have been Tundra and Lightning.) I don’t know how they ever let Tahoe and Trooper get away.
This makes me realize how smart Ford was when they latched on to the ‘Ex’ names. No other manufacturer is going to name a model starting with ‘Ex’ because they don’t want anyone to think it’s a Ford. Cadillac came close with the Escalade, but I think they’ll get away with it. As long as nobody challenges, Ford has a bunch of names to pick from. They were going to call that F-ten-billion-fifty which I referred to last month, the Exaggeration, but they changed their mind.
By the way, I received about ten billion messages questioning whether the truck ever existed (some even from Ford dealers). I am really hurt that anyone would think I would make up something like that. My brother-in-law was an engineer for Ford at the Dearborn plant over twenty-five years, and he would not lie.
Apparently, they made only one. It was even bigger than the Chevy Subdivision, which was designed to be ten times bigger than the Suburban, but never went to production. The F-10-Bil (as it came to be known) was so big that it couldn’t be built in Michigan; Ford had to ship all the parts to Texas where there was more room, and no one paid any attention because everything is expected to be big.
Some parts, like the tires, had to be made there, because there was no way to ship them to Texas from anywhere else. And even that caused a little ruckus when one of the tires got loose, rolled away, and crushed Waco. It looked like a giant hockey puck rolling across the countryside, unstoppable, until it ran into an I-35 overpass and fell over. This truck had thirty-two of those tires. It was built for just one purpose–to carry the rocket that was used to put Sedna into orbit.
And don’t tell me you haven’t heard about Sedna, the new planet that was ‘discovered’ on November 14, 2003. Its official name is 2003 VB12, but I like Sedna better. It’s three times farther out than Pluto, is about 1,000 miles in diameter, and takes 10,500 Earth years to orbit the Sun. Now you know why such a large rocket was needed, and therefore, such a big truck.
This was a joint effort between Ford and Wal-Mart. You see Wal-Mart wanted one of its stores to be the first thing a visitor saw when entering our little corner of the galaxy, but they couldn’t use Pluto because Walt Disney had already claimed it for his dog. Therefore, they had to go beyond Pluto. Ford’s part of the deal was the entire Wal-Mart parking lot had to be filled with Fords, so that galactic visitors would think everybody drove Fords.
Ford was not in favor of the name Sedna. They felt it was just one vowel away from Sedona, which is both a Kia SUV and a town in Arizona known for its extra-terrestrial vortices and the source of all the red dirt that was used to make the planet. They wanted Exclave, so it would be obvious that the planet, even though millions of miles away, was still considered to be part of Ford country. Evidently though, theirs wasn’t the committee that chose the name.
