Naming a (black) Prius

I'm submitting an email about how to name a Prius that I wrote to a friend who just took delivery of a new black Prius. Applies to any color, though.

Susan:

Naming machinery is, as you might guess, an arcane science quite different from naming an actual living thing. The Prius comes a bit closer to being a "living thing" ( like HAL from 2001) than most cars, but is still down the evolutionary ladder along with slime mold and (some) members of Congress. So, when trying to name a Prius, you need first to determine the gender. Don't look under the car either; you won't see anything that will tell you what gender your car is. It will take some time to figure that out. Some cars reveal their personalities quite early on, some are more Zen about it. For those who happen to own Zen Prii, the best thing would be to pick a gender neutral name if one does not want to wait an inordinately long time.

Cars are designed and assembled by human beings, for the most part, except possibly GM cars. As the result of human design, the machine itself will bear some distinct personality based on the input of the designers and builders. This is sometimes referred to as "Intelligent Design", but that's a misnomer because God never got around to making cars being so busy with orchestrating the rise and fall of dinosaurs between Monday and Wednesday of the first week of Genesis. By the time He/She got around to creating Adam and Eve, about Saturday afternoon by my guess, He/She didn't have time to create automobiles. That's a good thing because roads weren't invented until waaaaayyyyyy later.

So here you are in front of your shiny (for now) black Prius beginning what you hope will be a happy and relatively environmentally friendly driving experience, wondering what identity lurks under all that polished steel and aluminum (the hood and rear hatch are aluminum, so don't try to use magnets to hold anything to them).

Just a thought from your local "Gay Prius for the Straight Prius" guy, AVOID names that have the word "black" in them, just as you would avoid naming a boat anything with the word "sea" , or its variants, "C" , "SEE", etc. Like "Sea Angel", "C-Lark", "Sea Me Now", "C-Span".....well, you get the idea: too corny. Using the color of the car to help name it can be a cop-out and especially difficult given the color choices we get. Black, White and Red are pretty easy to make names out of, but try making a name out of "millenium silver" or "baby barf brown".

On an unrelated note: The front cup holder can be used to support a flower vase so that your Prius doesn't need to feel self conscious when pulling up to a VW Beetle with its pretentious glass flower vase. Flowers and colored throw pillows for the sofa like back seat will add color and make your car homey. Just a teensy bit more rear seat room and I'd be able to drop a throw rug.

Welcome to the Prius club. Big rule number one is to be nice to the TDI-biodiesel crowd and not get into this silly parochial debate about who's cleaner and friendlier to the environment. Hands down, the guy on the bicycle next to you has both of us beat. The TDI'ers on their chatline get into Prius bashing, but this is counter-productive and diverts our attention from the true target of our interest: the "Auto-saur". The TDI crowd do sometimes need to put big stickers on their cars to let the troglodyte driving public know that they are driving a really clean car and not a stinky petro-diesel...the TDI looks just like any other gasoline powered variant of the same model. The Prius was intentionally designed to be an obvious departure from everything else, although newer cars are starting to get the roundy jelly-bean, triggerfish look which will force us to be more conspicuous in our environmental self-righteousness.

Keep us posted about your experiences knowing that half of the Priuschat readership has been there and the other half is waiting for their cars (ships) to come in.

Hugs,
Bob