Driving on the Highway Trivia Quiz

Answer: August Horch

August Horch (1868-1951) was a blacksmith. He learned to build cars at Karl Benz' company, and started a first company in 1899 near Cologne. In 1904 he established a second (complementary) company in Zwickau, Saxony under the name A. Horch Automobilwerke. After a quarrel with the chief financial officer of the second company, August Horch broke with his first and second companies and founded a third company in Zwickau, intended to compete with his previous companies. But the trade name Horch was protected by copyright, so he had to come up with a new name. The son of one of his business friends suggested to translate the German name Horch in Latin (Audi), and this was unanimously accepted.
In 1932, Audi merged with DKW (founded by Jorgen Rasmussen), Wanderer (founded by Johann Winkeler and Richard Jaenicke) and A. Horch Automobilwerke. As four different companies worked now together, the logo of the four interlocking rings (one for each of the original companies) was adopted.
Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) founded the eponymous company and developed the (original) Volkswagen Beetle. Porsche, Audi and Volkswagen have merged into one group, but they still use their different brands and logos.
Gustaf Larson (1887-1968) founded the Swedish company Volvo.
Henry Ford (1863-1947) founded the eponymous American car company.

Answer: BMW

BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke, a company founded in 1916 by the merger of three manufacturers of (military) aircraft engines. When the Treaty of Versailles prohibited further production of engines for military aircraft, BMW turned to railway brakes and engines for busses and farm equipment. In 1923 BMW started producing motorcycles and added cars in 1928.
During the Second World War, BMW took up the production of engines for military aircraft once more, but once again the victors of the war prohibited this and other activities. BMW was allowed to restart motorcycle production in 1948 and car production in 1952.
The logo was created in 1917 and has been continually in use, albeit with minor stylistic changes. The blue and white colours happen to be the colours of the Bavarian flag.
Volvo uses a circle (demonstrating the company's name, Latin for "I roll") with an arrow pointing upwards to the right.
Toyota uses a circle filled with two ellipses, which ellipses suggest a stylized T.
Lexus uses an ellipse with a stylized L in it.

Answer: Dutch

André Citroën (1878-1935) was a French car manufacturer, born to a Dutch-Jewish father and Polish-Jewish mother. Father Levie Citroen (without the diacritic mark) had probably inherited the family name from an ancestor specialized as greengrocer of exotic fruits (including the lemon, which in Dutch is called "citroen").
Citroën founded his eponymous car company in 1919.
André Citroën had bought the patent for a gear shift with double helix (resembling two chevrons) in Poland, when he saw a local carpenter working with this kind of gear. The double helix gear shift was one of the technological novelties in the first Citroën cars, soon followed by the "traction avant" (front wheel drive) in 1934.

Answer: It is an abbreviation

Fiat stands for Fabbrica Italiana Automobile Torino, which translates to "Italian factory for automobiles in Turin". It is thus the abbreviation of the full company's name.
The Fiat company was founded by a number of investors, among whom Giovanni Agnelli - the first chairman of the board. Agnelli's family would be the principal shareholder for many years.
Fiat produced cars, tractors, trucks and aircraft engines.
Surely you didn't pick the onomatopoeia. Even in Italian, zooming by doesn't sound at all as rhyming with "squat".
The Latin red herring is not quite to the point. The Latin phrase intended is "Fiat lux" - translated as "Let there be light". Luxury would be translated into Latin as "deliciae" or "luxuria", both words not appearing in any common Latin phrase.

Answer: Jaguar

Did you notice all these "big cats" also indicate some form of driving? If so, you'd also noticed that the Tiger, the Panther and the Leopard are no average cars but medium to heavy tanks...
In 1922 the English William Lyons (1901-1985) and William Walmsley (1892-1961) founded the Swallow Sidecar company. When Walmsley in 1934 opted out, Lyons founded the SS holding company (SS being short for Swallow Sidecar) and offered a large part of the stock to the public.
The first model SS built in 1935, was named a SS Jaguar. In 1945 the name SS was dropped because the possible connection with the German paramilitary organization.
The Panther (PanzerKampfWagen V) was a medium to heavy tank in the German army between 1943 and 1945. It weighed almost 45 tons, and thus the "medium" designation is a bit confusing. South Korea developed in 2014 a heavy tank with the name K2 Black Panther.
The Tiger I (PanzerKampfWagen VI) was a heavy tank built between 1942 and 1945. Its successor was the Tiger II, nicknamed Königstiger (Royal Tiger).
The Leopard 1 was a West-German heavy tank built between 1964 and 1981. Its successor the Leopard 2 was launched in 1979.

Answer: Maserati

Carlo Maserati (1881-1910) and his brothers Bindo (1883-1980), Alfieri (1887-1932), Ettore (1894-1990) and Ernesto (1898-1975) were all involved in car manufacturing from the beginning of the 20th Century. Their brother Mario (1890-1981) did not make cars, but designed the logo for the company.
Before 1914, the brothers worked for Daitto, a car company that ceased to exist in 1929.
Alfieri, Ettore and Ernesto founded their own Maserati company in 1914 in Bologna. In 1926, they brought to market the first car named after their family. It was for this first Maserati car that Mario came up with the trident logo, inspired by the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna.
Lamborghini has as logo a bull. Ferrari chose a prancing racehorse as logo. And Bugatti (the sole French brand among this quartet) uses a stylized B with an inverted E (turned to the left instead of the right) linked to the B.

Answer: Emil Jelllinek's daughter

Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) had three brothers, but no sister. Daimler and his business partner Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929) started making engines, and made a first vehicle with an internal combustion engine in 1885. It is not clear whether this "Reitwagen" as they called it was a motorcycle or an automobile, but it did drive. In 1886 they installed a revised engine in a coach, and they continued to build engines for use in boats, cars, and airships. In 1889 they made a car and in 1890 they founded Daimler-Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG).
The next decade Daimler and Maybach quarrelled with the other shareholders of DMG, because Daimler and Maybach wanted to concentrate on automobile manufacture, while the others preferred specializing in engines only.
Emil Jellinek (1853-1918) was a German diplomat who became fascinated by the automobile. He was one of the first retailers of automobiles, and in 1900 he contacted DMG to develop a new race car. At that time Daimler was just deceased, and Maybach needed more funds. Jellinek gave Maybach a number of technical instructions for the new race car, and demanded that this car would be called Mercedes (after Jellinek's daughter, 1889-1929).
Karl Benz (1844-1929) was another German automobile constructor. He is credited with the invention of the automobile, as his first prototype was made in 1885. His wife Bertha Benz is reported as the first long-distance driver, when she drove (in 1888) over 100 km to visit her family. In 1899 Benz turned his company into a joint-stock company named Benz & Cie, which merged in 1926 with DMG. The company thus created in 1926 would sell their cars under the brand name Mercedes.
The three-pointed star is said to symbolize the company's ambition to having the predominant engines in the air, on the water and on the earth.

Answer: Mitsubishi

The name Mitsubishi literally would mean "three water chestnuts", and because of their basic appearance, the chestnuts have evolved to rhombi. So "three diamonds" is quite literally the name of the company.
It was Yataro Iwasaki (1834-1885) who created the Misubishi concern in 1870. At that time, it was only a shipbuilding company, but soon entered other markets: coal mining, steel, banking, insurance, heavy industry....
Mitsubishi started producing autos in 1917, under a different name. The name Mitsubishi Motors Corporation was adopted in 1970, with the logo dating back to 1870.
Honda's logo is a stylized H in a rectangle with rounded corners. Suzuki has as logo a stylized S. Nissan uses a circle with a smaller rectangle on top, in which rectangle the company name is inscribed.

Answer: Adam

Adam Opel (1837-1895) founded in 1862 a company to make sewing machines. In 1886 he diversified the company into the production of bicycles, and at the time of Adam's death his company was leader on the German market for both appliances.
Adam's five sons Carl, Wilhelm, Heinrich, Friedrich and Ludwig inherited the company and added automobile production in 1899 (at first as a subcontractor, from 1909 on with their own models). In 1920 the Opel company was the first European automobile manufacturer to introduce the assembly line.
The Opel logo has been revamped quite a lot. At first it was the combination of an A and an O (for the first and family name), but then it became the word Opel in an ellipse. Later on there appeared something that could be interpreted as an arrow or as a dirigible, and this finally became a horizontally stretched letter z (as a symbol of speed, perhaps). The combination with the circle (or capital letter O) appeared at the end of the sixties and has also been altered a bit on several occasions.
In 2012, one hundred and fifty years after the founding of the company, Opel launched a new model of compact car with the name Opel Adam, named after the founder.
The Kadett, the Mokka and the Blitz were other models of Opel cars or trucks.

Answer: Renault

Louis Renault (1877-1944) and his brothers Marcel (1872-1903) and Fernand (1864-1909) founded a car factory in 1899. Louis had built a first car in 1898, and the company Renault started producing their own engines in 1903.
Louis Renault was charged with collaboration after World War 2, and died in prison awaiting trial. His company was nationalized, but maintained the family name: it became the "Régie Nationale des Usines Renault". Soon after this nationalization, the logo for the company was radically changed too: in 1946 the diamond or lozenge appeared for the first time, and the changes since then are rather minimal.
Mazda uses a rectangle with rounded corners, with two stylized wings near the top.
Hyundai uses a stylized H, as does Honda. But the difference is the H for Honda is straightened, while the Hyundai H is in italic, and the background differs (an ellipse for Hyundai, a rounded rectangle for Honda).
Tesla uses a shield decorated with a very modern styled T (with an added bow on top).