Finance, Intellectual Property

Chevy Versus Ford Rivalry Takes Dumb Turn With Trademark Lawsuit Over The Word 'Cruise'

The newly filed lawsuit between these carmakers concerns not the meaningful engineering details of potentially transformative autonomous driving technology but the brand names under which self-driving features might, someday, be marketed.

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Some litigators love cases between long-term business competitors, because these cases help beef up the billable hours. Business competitors often grow to loathe one another over time. They usually have the resources to slog through a protracted fight, and litigants who are business competitors finally have an outlet to tussle over all the little pent-up slights and grievances that have accumulated for years. Lots of receipts are generated.

Even so, I’m not a big fan of such cases myself. I’d prefer to do something else with my time rather than usher a big d*ck-measuring contest through the court system. Still, anyone who has been a litigator long enough has seen their share of these actions, and that sure seems to me to be the, ahem, “thrust” of the new lawsuit between General Motors and Ford.

GM is, of course, the global automotive behemoth that manufacturers and markets vehicles under the Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac brands. We taxpayers famously bailed it out a little over a decade ago. Ford is the maker of such models as the iconic Ford F-150, the best-selling pickup truck in America for more than 40 years. Both automakers (along with the rest of the industry) are working on rolling out self-driving features. The newly filed lawsuit between these carmakers concerns not the meaningful engineering details of potentially transformative autonomous driving technology but the brand names under which self-driving features might, someday, be marketed.

You see, General Motors owns a subsidiary called Cruise, which develops driverless vehicle technology. Through this holding, GM purports to hold a valid trademark on the term “Cruise,” and GM also began using the phrase “Super Cruise” to refer to its forthcoming hands-free driver-assistance system as early as 2012. The apparent problem? Ford announced earlier this year that it would be naming its own hands-free driving technology “BlueCruise.”

According to GM’s recently filed lawsuit, Ford’s plan to call its hands-free technology “BlueCruise” infringes on GM’s “Cruise” and “Super Cruise” trademarks, and this will inevitably cause consumer confusion. Ford, on the other hand, says the lawsuit is “meritless and frivolous,” and (accurately) pointed out in a statement that drivers and automakers have used the word “cruise” for decades to refer to cruise control systems, a primitive precursor to modern self-driving features.

If you need a quick refresher on intellectual property law, an alleged trademark falls somewhere on a multipart continuum. From what is usually thought of as strongest to weakest, a mark may be fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, or generic. Fanciful marks are basically made-up words created just to serve as a trademark (think “Pepsi”). Arbitrary marks are common words, but they do not at all describe the thing they are being applied to (like using “Apple” to refer to electronics). Suggestive marks require some thought to arrive at the nature of the goods or services they are being applied to, while merely descriptive marks actually name some characteristic of the goods or services on offer (to actually register the latter as trademarks, an applicant must demonstrate that the descriptive terms have acquired particular distinctiveness). Generic terms are words that consumers understand as the general names for the goods or services on offer and these cannot be trademarked at all (like trying to use “Apple” as a trademark in describing an actual apple).

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It’s going to be up to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as to whether “BlueCruise” is close enough to “Cruise” and “Super Cruise” for GM to get monetary damages against Ford and to keep Ford from calling its hands-free driving system “BlueCruise.” If you ask me though, none of the three terms are very strong as potential trademarks, and none of them are particularly compelling as marketing copy either.

Sounds like a great case to be on for the lawyers if they previously had any qualms about meeting their receipts requirements for the next couple years. However, for everyone else — the Ford and GM shareholders, along with the auto-consuming public — this lawsuit seems to have about as much utility as a trailer park screaming match over whose Ford F-150 or Chevy Silverado has the biggest truck nuts.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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