I always thought the newbie rule #1 was always "don't register names because you think they are 'cool'".
You do have some good points, though, especially with SEs and parked pages - of course they are going to be penalized - there's no content in 99% of the parked pages out there! You can have Cars.com but if it is parked you can kiss any search engine traffic good buy, you'll only get type in and back link traffic.