How Did The Volkswagen Golf Get Its Name? (It Has Nothing To Do With The Sport)

Carmakers have a lot of methods for naming their vehicles. Some keep things simple, such Lexus, which uses two-letter abbreviations to tell exactly what each vehicle is. For example, the Lexus LS is a luxury sedan; if the second letter is an X, it's an SUV. Others choose themes. While not true of all of its vehicles, Chevrolet often names cars after real places, such as Silverado and Malibu, both communities in California, and Tahoe, a lake shared by California and Nevada.

But there's very little consistency in Volkswagen's naming patterns. Some Volkswagen models take their cues from Greek mythology, such as the Atlas, Eos, and Phaeton, but there's also the Taos, named after a town in New Mexico. Then you have the Golf, one of the best-selling Volkswagens ever made, in production for 50 years. Your first instinct might be to think it was named after the sport, but that could not be further from the truth. 

This is where you need to remember that Volkswagen is a German company, and some of its names are derived from German words. "Golf" is an abbreviated version of "golfstrom," the German word for the Gulf Stream ocean current. That may seem like it comes out of nowhere, but despite Volkswagen's lack of consistency overall in its naming strategy, the company does periodically come back to weather phenomena for names. Winds, in particular. 

While the Golf is the only Volkswagen named after an ocean current, several VW models have names derived from winds around the world, all dating back to the 1970s. The first was the now-discontinued Volkswagen Passat, first sold in 1973. Passat is a shortened version of the German word "passatwinde." This translates to "trade wind" in English.

The following year saw the introduction of the Golf, as well as the Volkswagen Scirocco. This car's initial run lasted until the early 1990s before being revived in 2008 for a nearly decade-long run. The Scirocco gets its name from the extremely powerful wind that blows through the Sahara to the Mediterranean Sea. The spelling of this wind varies, as most people spell it "sirocco," without that first letter "c," but Volkswagen opted to use all three "c's" for its car.

Lastly, there's another of the company's most popular vehicles, the fun Volkswagen Jetta. It started production five years after the Golf and Scirocco, but even with that gap in time, wind names were still being used. Jetta is German for "jet stream." And these are just the wind-based names Volkswagen used in North America. There are also VW's Bora, Polo, and Vento, all named after winds as well, but they never made their way Stateside. The Golf is the oddity in this climate bundle, though the Gulf Stream does require wind to exist.