Ford Spends Nine Months Naming a Truck. Retire the Naming Department.

The news: the first vehicle built on Ford's Universal EV Platform, its shared base for electric vehicles, is a midsize truck called the Fathom. In the paragraph that prints a starting MSRP of $28,350 for the base model with the standard-range battery, excluding taxes, title, registration and fees, Ford writes: "But the price is the least interesting thing about it."

Ford spent nine months on that name. Divide nine months by the six letters Ford calls "the whole brief" and you get a month and a half per letter; the number that decides whether anybody buys this truck got one clause and a footnote. So the naming department is retired.

Grant Ford the name. Fathom once meant the span of a person's outstretched arms, then sailors used it for water they could not see the bottom of, and it ended up meaning to understand a thing completely. It is better writing than the industry usually manages, and it does not matter. The screen, the frunk, the digital key, Ford's projection of more passenger volume than a Toyota RAV4 (no figure given for either): available elsewhere. The number is not.

My sister in the suburbs drives a three-row SUV and we are cordial. She has never once chosen a vehicle on a paragraph about a sailor's outstretched arms. Hank Whitaker owns three cars that do not run and can name all three. Ford's naming team walked the floor asking as many as 15 engineers to pick a favorite; nobody walked the floor asking my sister what she could pay.

So: the naming department is retired, at Ford and everywhere else, with thanks. Nobody is fired, the salaries continue, the file of hundreds stays in its drawer, and nobody in it names a vehicle again. They keep Fathom, the best thing that room will ever make. The truck takes the number instead: the Ford $28,350, base model, standard-range battery, before taxes, title, registration and fees.