Here Is The Only Car Named The Same As A Beast From Star Wars: Cold Start

The Star Wars franchise or cinematic universe or mythos whatever you want to call it is full of all manner of fictional animals and beasts and creatures, and they all have names, because if they didn’t, it’d be harder to sell action figures of them. I believe there is precisely one – albeit imperfect – crossover between Star Wars universe beasts and automobiles, and that crossover is between that smelly native of the ice planet of Hoth with the satisfyingly warm innards, the tauntaun, and the Taunton Automobile Company.

Sure, the spelling is a little different, but I’ll take what I can get in an instance like this. We have two Tauntauns/Tauntons! Who am I to nitpick over some letters!

The Taunton Automobile Company was active between 1901 to 1904 and are interesting in that they built both steam and gasoline cars, which is, surprisingly, exceedingly rare in the motor industry. You would think some number of the biggest and oldest carmakers would have had a history in steam vehicles, but that’s not the case. So a company that moved from one to another is kind of unusual.

Here’s the steam car, from around 1902:

It used a three-cylinder engine and a boiler of the water tube type with a superheating coil, words that I suspect will make the most sense only to our long-dead readers. The gasoline version from 1904 seems to have essentially the same bodywork:

Note the extra seat up front with the flip-down footrest, supported by those twin chains. These used a water-cooled single-cylinder engine making all of seven horsepower. Taunton didn’t last very long, part of that huge boom of automotive startups around the turn of the last century.

Now, the other Tauntauns, the fictional animals, are native to the ice planet of Hoth and are reptomammals which seem to be some sort of reptile/mammal hybrid. They seem very mammalian, giving birth to live young and having fur, a helpful adaptation to the cold environment of Hoth.

They also had four nostrils that helped to pre-heat the air they breathed, and, from what I can tell from this footage of an impromptu autopsy, an abdomen full of cylindrical lipidous bodies that function much like blubber in some Earth mammals:

Fascinating!

Here’s the other natural habitat of the Tauntaun: a Kenner box. They couldn’t have thrown in one action figure? No Han? Cheapskates.