What are the most commonly misspelt auto brand names?

Recently an ad for Hyundai ran in Britain in which vox popped peeps were revealed to be terrible at spelling and pronounciation of the auto brand’s name. Is it pronounced ‘Hee-un-day’ or ‘Hi-un-day’? Heck, maybe it’s ‘(H)YAn-day’ like they say in Japan. As for spelling the brand, it seems advertising in Britain hasn’t been paying very well.

The terrible spelling and pronunciations prompted car insurance folk at Zego LTD to suss out what other auto brand names people are getting wrong. Turns out, there’s plenty.

The top 10 most commonly misspelt car brands are Porsche at number one; Peugeot at number two; Kia at number three; and Hyundai at number four.

Surprisingly, not even Tesla is spelt correctly by folks searching for it online – and you’d think that one would be easy.

The research was conducted looking at the total monthly misspelt searches online. Out of 157,000 searches for Porsche, for example, 28,700 people got it wrong – or at least got lazy. Out of 306,000 searches for Tesla, 3,770 folks got it incorrect.

Other auto brands that ignoramuses couldn’t spell right, even if they might be able to afford them are Bentley, Ferrari, Mercedes, Lamborghini and, goodness gracious, even Toyota.

So how do dummies spell these brands? Porsche often sees the words ‘Porche’ and ‘Porshe’ keyed in. Peugeot understandably gets mixed up with the likes of ‘Peugot’, ‘Peigeot’ and ‘Puegot’. But the very simple Kia takes the cake with idiots spelling it ‘Kea’, ‘Kiea’ and ‘Kya’.

As for Elon Musk’s famed electric vehicle, those looking up Tesla online are either really, really daft, or just plain lazy. Search words for that brand include ‘Tesal’, ‘Telsa’ and ‘Tesl’.

Granted, in regards to that last one, how many of us have bothered to finish keying in a word in Google search when three or four letters often suffice?

Antonino Tati