When the steering wheel was first put into use in automobiles, it was called the "whip". The whip is what you used to control the horses on a stagecoach , hence the analogy. Many years later, various hip hop artists noticed that the Mercedes-Benz logo resembled a steering wheel. They then proceeded to use the old term "whip" to describe any Mercedes-Benz vehicle. The term has now been generalized to classify any expensive automobile.