Oh, how good it is that nobody knows...
...that I... Yes, what am I actually called now? Many a classic car would probably be puzzled by the widespread misconceptions circulating about its model name. Especially when even the former manufacturer has adopted the wrong name and now consistently uses and disseminates it in all official documents - in line with the Duden quality claim: "If only enough people get it wrong, it'll just be right."
The most prominent example of this phenomenon is probably the Audi Sport Quattro E2, which is almost exclusively called S1 by the rally-enthusiastic but less rally-read world. However, only a glance at the contemporary FIA homologation papers would reveal that the Audi Sport Quattro S1 was not the spoiler-ridden monster that made its debut at the Olympus Rally in mid-1985 - but its almost completely wingless and therefore unpredictable predecessor, which had been in use since 1984.
But instead of correcting the mistake in the interests of its own credibility and a correct reflection of the brand history, Ingolstadt preferred to create the hyper-correction of the "Sport Quattro S1 E2". Why hypercorrection? Because although the E2 was a further development of the Sport Quattro, it was not based on the S1, but was built on 20 brand-new examples.
A similar thing happened to the Porsche Carrera RS from 1973, which has recently been consistently downgraded by the factory to a mundane 911 and therefore has to boast about its engine capacity as compensation. The portfolio of the Zuffenhausen-based company is particularly rich in these pseudo-expert number insertions, see Carrera GTS (904) or Turbo (either 911 or 930). Even the 356 came as a new car without a project-internal combination of letters and numbers and was, for example, a simple Porsche 1600 Super.
Of course, deliberate misnaming is different from colloquial simplification. The fact that the Mercedes-Benz 250 TD of the S 124 model became the tongue-twisting E 250 Diesel T with the second model update is too cumbersome for most youngtimer fans in everyday life. Quite apart from the fact that nobody usually bothers to mention the name of the inventor anyway. Strictly speaking, a Mercedes is something different from a Mercedes-Benz. Perhaps someone should tell that to the self-proclaimed "oldest car brand in the world".
But perhaps I should also just start writing about my Opel Rolex instead of the Omega - and wait until they finally realize their mistake in Rüsselsheim.
