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Originally Posted by Dean
And what exactly then is an option? All the STI stuff could easily be called the "performance package", and the RA could be the "race package", etc....
And if one includes the other, then so be it.
Just because you can get a different engine, suspension, interior, body kit, does not make it a different car.
Car manufacturers have been making different power plant, suspension, exterior and interior options for a base car for years. The Japanese did not invent that, they only turned it into a marketing tool, which is what I am objecting to, and the Americans have followed.
At the rate we are going, there will be no room on the rear of a car for the dealerships to put their crappy badges on. Maybe that is how the manufacturers plan to get 50/50 weight distribution eventually; 800lbs. of badges on the tail end of the car.
As Scott pointed out earlier, nobody says WRX STI in conversation, they say STI, or whatever is required to differentiate to the extent necessary for the conversation. It is the Marketing people trying to one up the competition by adding one more "cool" or "elitist" or "special" designation to the name of the vehicle that causes my objection.
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Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah....
Dean, let's say we call the "STi" the "performance package"... besides going from 3 letters to 18, how am I supposed to know if that's the Impreza tuned by STi, or the one tuned by Prodrive?
The naming schemes aren't the marketing ploy... the car features that the names describe are the marketing ploy. The names just let people talk about them more easily. If I want to talk about all Impreza I say "Impreza"... if I want to talk about the 2.2L turbo version sold in the UK and Japan in the late 90's with the widebody kit, I say "22b". It's a hell of a lot easier to talk about that specific car because they gave it a specific name. If someone asked what kind of car you have would you say "I have a Subaru"? Then when they asked, "what Subaru"... would you rather say, "I've got the mid-sized, 2.0L turbo-charged Subaru" (and still have your car confused w/ the Legacy) or would you rather say "WRX"? With your solution, we either can't describe the car beyond "I've got a Ford", or we're going to have 200 unique names per marque, just so we can tell the turbo Impreza from the N/A one.
And here's the back of the "Subaru Impreza WRX STi Type-RA Spec-C"...
Damn, they really *are* out of room on the trunk aren't they.
I'm having a really hard time trying to understand how being able to specifically identify a car by its name is a bad thing. Just use the most pertinant part(s) of the name for the context. And if you don't know enough about the car to know the differences in the extra names, well, you certainly won't need to know them or use them, will you.