Why did you name me after a car?

It’s the question every father dreads. How do you explain to your adoring, trusting daughter that you chose her name - the eleventh most popular in France this year - before Renault launched its new electric car, the Zoe.

This is the fear that led Cédric Renault - note the surname - to take the automobile giant to court, to make it think again about what it was going to call its new eco-car, which is due to be launched mid-2012.

"I really don’t want my daughter to be compared to a lump of metal," he told the judge in the court of first instance in Paris. "When she is in her teens, I fear she will the butt of many saracastic barbs."
The judge did not agree.

He ruled that the families - Cédric Renault brought the case with another aggrieved family - had not shown that "sure, direct and real prejudice" would be visited on their daughters if Renault pressed ahead with its planned name for the new small sedan.

The families’ lawyer, David Koubbi, says he plans to appeal: "Your prenom is fundamental to your personality."

Mr Koubbi will doubtless be calling on the services of a newly formed pressure group, ADNP (l’association pour la défense de nos prénoms: the assocation for the defence of first names), which came into existence this year take up cudgels against "objectication". Catherine Lenoir, its president, defined its position pithily: "First names are for humans."

And then there are the 6,000 internauts behind the Facebook page "Zoe isn’t a car", set up in defence of all 35,000 Zoes in France.

Renault, somewhat plaintively, has tried to explain why it chose Zoe: Z,O and E is an acronym (of a sort) for Zero Emission, true enough for what would, after all, be an impeccably ecolo vehicle. And, what is more, Zoe is the Greek for "life".

None of which cuts much ice with the internet warriors, who, not content with merely stopping Renault using Zoe, say they rather think that a better name would be ZEO.