Hyundai is a Korean company, so perhaps this is a “lost in translation” issue, but is this the “the horses were watching me try to have sex, so I couldn’t get it up, so I blinded them with a railroad spike” car? Because that’s what happens in the play/movie Equus! Now, I know that Equus is also a genus of animals, but it includes donkeys and (presumably) mules. So, you could conceivably say that this car is stubborn as a mule, or acts like a jackass. But the connection to the play/movie is probably what people will think of most. So that means that if they’re men, they’ll think this is the impotence car.
Um, maybe they could offer free Viagra for life with purchase of the car. Or perhaps they could tout it as especially safe for single women to help avoid sexual assaults. But I think they should have thought twice about that name. It might even conjure up images of it being the bestiality car for the same reason: that crappy movie!
But probably they’ve (the car company/ad guys) never seen the movie Equus, or maybe they just remember Jenny Agutter’s nude sequence and fell asleep for the boring/stupid plot and Richard Burton’s “acting” spasms. But still, that connection is kinda hard to miss! (Maybe they’re hoping we won’t remember it!) And in any case, if I were advising them, I’d tell them to choose a different animal-related name: like perhaps, um, any other animal-related name!
Here is an ad for the Hyundai Equus (from S. Korea, I guess). The fact that it’s in the dark, and that they focus on the headlights a lot, only serves to reinforce that idea of the horses watching you trying to have sex (unsuccessfully) in the dark, like in the movie Equus; or at least, that’s how it seems to me:
And here is the American commercial. They cheat and show you the iPad owner’s manual, hoping we’ll forget about that movie Equus, but we don’t. In fact, this is the ad I saw initially for the car, and the name alone made me think of it!:
