10 Cars You Never Think About That Happen To Be Decent Wordle Starting Guesses

“QUEST,” as in the Nissan, is an objectively bad starting word. The letter “Q” starts the fifth-fewest number of words in the English language and appears in the second-fewest words behind only the letter “J,” per Wikipedia. Frankly, the only way it could be worse is if it repeated letters.

Nevertheless, it’s here to make a point. You could use one of those fancy-pants algorithms invented by someone smarter than me to make the game play itself, or you could channel the memory of Nissan’s cash-in on the ’90s minivan craze. That makes it ironically appropriate considering the theme of this blog. Changing the subject, I’d somehow never realized that the first two generations of the Quest were rebadged Mercury Villagers. They wore the same dopey face this whole time!

GM’s weird transforming SUV/pickup hybrid thing swallows vowels like tall cabinets. It’s a better candidate for taking letters off the board than “QUEST” too, because “E” starts the 11th-most words in the dictionary.

I’m going to hazard a guess and say Jalops think about all cars more often than the average person, but the AMC Pacer potentially moreso than the average enthusiast. It’s shown up in many a Torchinsky blog, even this one about the Porsche 928. “P” also happens to start a lot of words, so I guess it’s OK for an opening salvo, too.

A car that belongs on the Good Faces Twitter account, the Chevrolet Spark also makes for a solid first guess because “S” begins the most words in English, and “A” and “R” appear quite frequently as well. Just make sure you visualize the cute Spark that looks like Pikachu as you lock it in and not its successor, which looks like an obnoxious anime bug. That’s bad luck and will guarantee failure in six tries.

I always thought the Fiat Bravo was a smart-looking little hatchback — much cleaner and more stylish than Lancia’s take on it, which gave us the second-generation Delta. It’s also only five letters long, which makes it suitable for this list. I had to double check if “BRAVO” passed muster in Wordle and am pleased to report it most certainly does.

Do you remember the Chrysler Aspen? It was an upmarket take on the lumpy Dodge Durango that only lasted three model years, between 2007 and 2009. “ASPEN” is of course more commonly known as the name of a type of tree, which is why I’m surprised it counts in Wordle. This is the most anyone’s thought about the Chrysler Aspen since its appearance in Meh Car Monday, which was the most anyone thought about it since 15 minutes after it was announced in a press release midway through W’s second term. Thank you for sharing this historic moment with me.

I’ll admit that 60 percent of the appeal of writing this for me was the thought of putting the Lister Storm and Chrysler Aspen next to each other in an article. In what other context would these two cars ever be mentioned in the same breath? The Geo Storm maybe, but that’s not the one we’re talking about here. Apparently a Lister Storm won the 2000 FIA GT Championship after a Viper GTS-R won it the previous year, and Vipers competed under the Chrysler banner in Europe. Make of that what you will.

Surely if you’ve played Wordle for a while now, you’ve used “TODAY” at least once. Now, the next time you do it, you won’t have the next 12 hours in mind or Billy Corgan’s wail, but rather the most delightful thing the word has ever been attached to — Honda’s kei car with a precious mug.

I don’t know much about the Suzuki Swift, other than that it’s nominated as one of the World Cars of the Year every now and again. That inevitably saddens me because it’s one of Suzuki’s many delightful creations that we don’t get here in the States. We were so awful to Suzuki, though, and frankly don’t deserve its good graces. Feel guilty about that while you take these letters off the board.

Joining the class of “short-lived SUVs you forgot about,” here’s the Isuzu Axiom — a car I remember looking pretty handsome, at least as far as SUVs went in the early aughts. That didn’t matter though, because while the Axiom was intended to be Isuzu’s play at the burgeoning Highlander crowd, it only lasted from 2002 to 2004 and was promptly killed off in favor of the Trailblazer- (and Envoy) based Ascender. It’s bad at Wordle too, because there aren’t a ton of five-letter words that contain the letter “X.”

We end this shameless stretch of a list with what I believe to be the most forgettable vehicle here — Saturn’s version of GM’s quartet of pseudo-SUV/van bars of soap on radials, the Relay. Unfortunately, while the Uplander, Montana and whatever the hell a “Terraza” is are all too long for Wordle — and also not actual words — the Relay bears the distinction of fitting and taking up to three vowels out of contention, depending on your stance on the letter “Y.” That makes it good enough for me, even if it wasn’t good enough to keep Saturn alive.

If you think up any amusing five-letter car names that also happen to be in the dictionary, drop them in the comments! The more obscure or terrible, the better.