Look, cars need to be called something. After you run out of famous people, and exotic places, and wild animals, and you’ve plucked all of the possible letter-and-number combinations from the alphanumeric Scrabble bag, what’s left? Weather. It’s all around us, it affects how we go about our daily lives, and it packs frightening, unimaginable power.

Probably no one would buy a car called a Nor’easter or a Chetco Effect. (No one in an English-speaking country, anyway.) But a Mistral? A Zephyr? A Zonda? Ooooooh. They sound impossibly mysterious, foreign, and exotic. To be caught in a Passat means you’re somewhere tropical, probably sipping on a fruity drink with an umbrella piercing a piece of pineapple. To feel a Ghibli means you’re somewhere in northern Africa.

Meteorology and grease monkeys collide.