There is an abundance of car guy channels and international borders are crossed very easily via TV shows or YouTube programs.
The net result is car guys on this side of the pond have learned some of the British car guy terms when they watch UK programs.
Sometimes North American even use some of the British car guy lingo, possibly to sound more sophisticated or worldly in a pretentious way.
Jim Sutherland

We at MyStarCollectorCar prefer to use the North American car guy language because we understand it and have embraced the colonist automotive lingo for too many years to change our game at this point. However, we do understand the British car guy terminology and would like to cross-reference the two international words for the same thing.
Our readers can pick their own poison in this matter but at least they will have a basic working knowledge if they do not watch car shows on a regular basis. We have touched on this topic a few times over the past 16 years, but this time we chose five different car guy terms for interpretive purposes.
The first term on our list is door cards, a.k.a. door panels in North American car guy circles. Door cards/panels are the interior coverings for the doors in every vehicle.

They may be composed of fabric, leather, or even plastic in some cases. To be honest, we had never even heard of door cards until the 21st century when access to cable and internet car shows expanded our own access to British car guy shows. Door cards has become more accepted by younger car guys in North America, presumably because they are young enough to embrace new fads.
The second term on our list is “wings”, a term used in reference to fenders by British car guys. The best explanation was the way British car builders used to design their cars, specifically the curvy bodylines on their vintage cars that gave the illusion of flight. The wing name stuck-even after British cars lost their style magic and used a squarish car design very similar to every other auto builder.

As mentioned, a fender has the same meaning as wing here in North America, but our wing is typically located on a trunk to provide downforce on North American cars. The grim reality: North American wings are typically found on cars where the term ”All-show-and-no-go” is a very accurate description in most cases.

Our third pan-Atlantic car guy term is “sill”, commonly called a rocker panel in North America. The sill/rocker panel is the strip of metal under the doors of a car. The name nod goes to the Brits for their sill label because they believe sill describes the bottom portion of an object (e.g. windowsill), consequently a car’s sill is the correct term.

They are not wrong, but we have always called them rocker panels and see no reason to change to a more accurate term at this point.
The fourth vehicle vernacular on our list is an “estate” car, more commonly labeled a station wagon in North America. The theory behind the origin of station wagon is the pre-war era when station wagon referred to a vehicle that could haul passengers and their luggage from a train station.

Estate vehicles were built for the same purpose but served the needs of wealthy English people who lived on estates during the early days of the automotive era- thus the estate handle.
The fifth and final addition to our list is “saloon” and “sedan”, two automotive terms that mean the same thing, specifically a multi-passenger car. Saloon has a different meaning in North America because we associate the term with a place like the Long Branch Saloon where Miss Kitty avoided the clutches of drunken cowboys and Matt Dillon ventilated the lawless ones.

The Brits leaned toward a more glamorous vision because a saloon was a high-end train car used by upscale people, so it was a good automotive marketing term for their passenger cars.
On the other hand, a sedan had its roots with a bygone world where wealthy people were transported in wheel-less carriages by foot servants from Point A to Point B. The ancient mode of transportation may not have been viewed very favorably by the servants, but sedan was an effort to associate cars with a high form of luxury from the past.
However, most modern sedans were low-cost stripper cars and likely got in the way of the attempted marketing illusion to link them with the first human-powered sedans.
We at MyStarCollectorCar have no crystal ball on future car guy terms, but we believe North America and Great Britain will eventually use the same lingo because of the influential power of our cyber-linked world.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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