alt Hacker NewsPretend for a minute that this naming scheme was successful, that sales of cars called pre-owned were higher than cars called used. Neither term is deceptive, both accurately describe the situation. What this tells you is that the problem isn't the cars, it's the existing negative connotation attached to the word used. The car industry picked a blank slate term for themselves and how people feel about the term pre-owned will be in line with their feelings about the cars and nothing else. The fact that this term has been in use for a long time and still (by assumption) carries a positive connotation means that people are having positive experiences with used cars.
This to me is actually the opposite of deceptive. The used car industry took a risk by asking to be judged on their merits because pre-owned could have been synonymous with garbage in short order. There was little anchoring it to any particular connotation.
If you create a new term for something that there was previously a common, unambiguous term for, people's animal brains assume that there's some sort of difference between the new and old thing, even if the words literally mean the same thing (if you use the actual meaning of the words in technical or industry jargon to determine their meaning, you will usually be wrong.) In other words there's an "existing negative connotation," although you attach this to the word (is it the sound of the word or the ugliness of the letters that creates this connotation? It is a mystery) rather than to the actual thing that the old word denoted.
This is entirely deceptive, and nothing else. It is a change solely made to confuse people about the validity of their past experiences, and to sucker them into disregarding them when making very expensive decisions about their futures.