A British car company. It has made cars in Britain since the early 1900s, and for most of the last century it was one of the ordinary, everyday brands there — the kind of car a normal family bought, not a luxury one. For a long time it belonged to General Motors, the big American company, and its cars were often the same cars sold as Opel in the rest of Europe with a different badge on the front; ownership has moved since then, into the large European group that also owns Peugeot and Citroën, so a very current source may describe it differently from an older dictionary. Two more things worth knowing about the name. First, it is also a place in London — a district beside the River Thames, with a busy station — and Londoners use the name that way every day. Second, the word travelled: Russian took Vauxhall in as вокзал (vokzal), which is now simply the Russian word for a railway station, because a famous pleasure garden of that name became linked with an early station. Pronunciation is the trap: it sounds like VOKS-hall, and the first part rhymes with box, not with vow.