How the Hell Do You Pronounce “Car Gurus”?

The commercials have me so confused

Melissa Balick
2 min readMar 7, 2022
DepositPhotos

Have you ever seen a commercial for CarGurus.com?

I have because I watch Jeopardy! and streaming things that have ads. The commercials are standard advertising fare: someone is mystified by something that’s actually not that hard, and a totally unnecessary product is introduced as the solution to that non-existent problem.

In this case, the not-difficult thing is finding cars for sale from dealers, and the product that will solve this non-existent problem is CarGurus, a web site for locating cars from dealers.

(Please note that, yes, it’s harder to get a car right now, and I know that. But that’s not because it’s difficult to locate listings, it’s because of chip shortages and material backlogs, due to both COVID and, I’d guess, because we’re literally using up everything on Earth.)

Anyway, it’s not the content of CarGurus commercials that puzzle me. It’s pronunciation.

Why do they say it like that?

In at least half of the commercials, both the actors and announcers pronounce the name of the company as CAR GA ROOSE. It kind of sounds like “kangaroos” or “Belarus.”

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Melissa Balick

Fiction writer with a couple stories published in literary magazines, nanny, reader of way too many books.