Electric Car Branding Is, for the Most Part, Awful. Why?

Carmakers seem fixed on making the automotive future sound boring and confusing.

Published January 16, 2024

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The automotive world is in the midst of converting from internal combustion engines to battery-electric power this decade. Several car manufacturers have pledged to be 100-percent EV by 2030; most that haven’t are still planning to produce large volumes of electric cars in this decade.

The big winners from this effort thus far, however, appears to be branding consultants. Nearly every manufacturer has created a novel, EV-specific sub-brand to mark their transition. Nearly all of these branding efforts have turned out awfully.

What happened? Essentially, car companies took the wrong lesson from Tesla’s success. They tried to position their EVs as cool, futuristic tech products instead of cars, with names and branding to match. The efforts have been ham-fisted — boring at best, confusing mouthfuls at worst. Worse, the nouveau branding is squandering what should have been conventional manufacturers’ biggest advantage against upstarts like Tesla: their reputations and heritage.

Modern EV branding could not sound more ubiquitous

Manufacturers intended their EV brands to sound distinctive. Instead, most blend in with each other like achromatic crossovers in a parking garage.

BMW tried to sound tech-forward, hopping on the use of the “i’ — like “information,” like a computer, get it? — prefix in the early 2010s with the i3 and the i8 hybrid. VW made a similar play with its ID. cars. Cadillac has taken on IQ, but to be different, uses it as a suffix awkwardly replacing the letters of actual words — Lyriq, Optiq, etc. Hyundai, oddly enough, also uses “IQ,” but it added a minimal amount of zest by using it in the form of the name Ioniq.

Brands that eschewed “i” went for “e.” (If we have to tell you what that’s supposed to imply, you may be beyond help.) Mercedes launched the EQ sub-brand, but also dabbled with calling those cars Mercedes-EQ. Volvo settled on EX. Audi affixes the name e-Tron to its EVs. Kia swiped up the on-the-nose name of EV before other manufacturers could get there.

Here’s the thing: all these brands sound basically identical; they add nothing of value to the car’s name or identity, and they don’t feel built for the long haul — especially come the day when manufacturers are only building EVs. Is Kia really expecting buyers to stop, drop and differentiate between the EV3, EV4, EV5, EV6, EV7, EV8 and EV9 when walking into a dealer?

Surely, the Japanese brands — relative late-comers to EVs — could have avoided this pitfall. Toyota bucked that trend a bit by using Beyond Zero (shortened to bZ for use on cars) branding. At least, it seemed like it bucked the trend … until chief rival Honda unveiled its new EV line, the nearly identically-named Zero series.

Wonky branding yields wonky and confusing car names

Speaking of Toyota: Toyota went all-in with its oddly stylized bZ branding. Instead of Highlander bZ or Tacoma bZ thus far, Toyota has launched the bZ4X, which sounds more like a printer that would have been destroyed in Office Space.

Audi, meanwhile, has just pulled itself out of a downright muddle with its again-unnecessarily-lowercase e-Tron branding. These days, Audi is simply added e-Tron to its regular alphanumeric nomenclature (i.e. Q4 E-Tron); still, not long ago, the brand’s two EV models were the E-Tron GT sports car and the E-Tron SUV … neither of which had any relation to one another beneath the skin.

Cadillac has been pulling a Rich Boy and cutely swapping in IQ as an “ick” sound at the end of words (Lyriq, Optiq) and syllable concoctions that sort of sound like words (Celestiq, Vistiq). But when it came to the Escalade, the branding suddenly went simple, naming it the Escalade IQ.

sticker on door of a polestar 2 — Polestar adds a sticker to its EVs to tell people what kind of car it is.

We’ve even had an unnecessary new EV brand

Volvo has spent an inordinate amount of effort spinning its performance arm Polestar off into a separate brand, complete with its own showrooms. The cars are nice, and so is the new straight-forward pricing model. But it’s not clear why it needed to be a separate brand.

Polestar is positioned to be more premium and exciting than Volvo. But the only car currently in the new showrooms is the Polestar 2, which is competing with relatively affordable mass-market EVs … and looks very much like a Volvo sedan. And it’s impossible to explain what Polestar is without referencing Volvo.

How well is Polestar resonating with buyers? Here’s a clue: the Polestar logo usually goes unseen in body color on its vehicles. Polestar actually affixes stickers on the doors of its press cars so onlookers can tell what the car is.

Yes, Polestar does have several exciting new cars en route. But you could also argue those models just siphoning excitement away from Volvo’s EV transition.

ford f150 lightning — “Lightning” would be a perfect name for an electric F-150 even if it weren’t the name of Ford’s old super-truck.

The best EV branding has leaned on tradition

If you were to pick out a brand that has done EV branding relatively well, it’s Ford. Instead of trying to give its electric vehicles completely new brand identities, Ford has tied EVs to its existing branding to add authenticity.

Naming its first EV crossover the Mustang Mach-E may have seemed like sacrilege on paper. But in practice, is resonated with buyers, injected some style and uniqueness into the electric car market — and probably forced Ford to put a bit more effort into it on the performance front. How did Ford make its first electric truck feel less scary? By calling it a Ford F-150 Lightning, harkening back to the old performance truck version of the F-Series — and making it look as much like a combustion F-150 as possible.

This approach has worked — and not just by converting existing Ford buyers to EVs. It’s bringing other new EV buyers to Ford.

volkswagen id gti concept — The VW ID. GTI’s name makes it a bit more clear what to expect when you meet it.

Car companies, thankfully, are starting to rethink EV branding

The tides appear to be turning in a favorable way, however. Last year, VW released an ID concept that was an electric take on the GTI and simply named it the ID. GTI. We expect that car will make it to production. Mercedes is reportedly phasing out its EQ branding for vehicles starting this year, preparing for the day when the EQS is just the S-Class.

Chevy’s new Blazer EV uses the same name and cribs a lot of its looks from its successful Blazer combustion counterpart (and will soon have a Blazer SS EV model). The brand is using the same method with the upcoming Equinox EV. And we should see the Corvette brand make it to the EV world soon. Here’s hoping that if Toyota drops a production version of its cool unibody EV pickup, it chooses the name Stout over something like … bZ3T.

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