Convertible Coupe?

[stexch]

My current Sports Car Market magazine refers to a "convertible coupe". Isn't this an oxymoron? Or perhaps my understanding of a coupe as a two-door with B-pillars and a trunk is more recent.

[1937hd45]

Convertible Coupe and Cabriolet are interchangable body type names. Both have fixed windshields and rollup door windows. Most of the great cars were made pre 1936, and these body types faded into history.

[stexch]

Thanks for the help. I did a google search, and found that Ford, Packard, & Cord used the term (possibly others as well). It appears to have gone out of usage around 1941. Am I correct that this is the American equivalent of the British "drop head coupe"?

[Guest BillP]

My 37 Lasalle is a Convertible Coupe, listed as such in the literature. It's a two door, rumble seat body style with roll-up door windows. I believe the four door version was called convertible sedan. I'd have to look it up, but I think the 4 door sedan was referred to in the literature as a touring sedan but that just a marketing name to romance an otherwise standard vehicle.

[Guest bkazmer]

a convertible coupe is the equivalent of a drophead coupé. Both have roll up windows, which a roadster does not. A touring sedan normally has 3 side windows per side (has both a C and D pillar) wheras a town sedan does not.

[Twitch]

Just to be Devil's advocate, if I heard that definition out of context I'd picture the 57-57 Ford Skyliners with the retractable metal hardtops but as todays luxury coupes like the Cad XLR or the Lexus.

[Guest De Soto Frank]

Stexch,

As for "Coupe" - that would be a closed car with a small cabin with one bench seat (or split buckets), accomodating 2 or maybe 3 passengers in the cabin. There is no back seat in a true coupe, unless it's a rumble seat.

A coupe has a different body silhouette than a 2-dr sedan ( or "coach"). The cabin enclosure is much smaller on the coupe.

Around 1940, US makers began putting back seats (folding "jump seats" mounted sideways, or a rear bench) and adding quarter windows behind the "B" pillar; these seated 4-5 people and became known as Club Coupes, and the other coupe became known as the "business coupe" (still 2-3 passenger).

The term "convertible coupe" was developed in the early 30's as a distinction between the aforementioned 2 or 3-passenger car with roll-up windows and folding top, and the "roadster" or "runabout", which was also a 2 or 3 passenger open car with a folding top, but did not have roll-up glass windows but instead were fitted with side-curtains.

When the top is up, "convertible coupes" have a silhouette very similar to a closed-coupe. A roadster with the top up looks more like a touring car, with a reverse-angle at the rear of the top, leading back to the body at the beltline.

Most US companies built their last true "roadsters" between 1936 & '38; the major exception was the Dodge "Wayfarer" roadster in 1949, which true to the "Roadster" definition, had the single bench seat, and side curtains instead of roll-up windows.

Also, a more-true "convertible coupe" would only have a single bench seat (possibly twin buckets); if it has a back seat (like most 1940 and later ragtops), it is more properly a convertible coach ( like a 2-dr sedan or hardtop body, except with a folding top; or maybe "convertible Club Coupe" ? ).

Most (if not all) American convertibles after 1948 fit my "Convertible coach" definition, Corvettes and T-birds and similar "sport-cars" excepted.

The Frazer and Kaiser "Manhatten" and the four-dr. Lincoln from the '60s would be "convertible sedans", as they are four-doors.

But, to most common folks or ad writers, if the top folds-up, that makes the vehicle a "convertible"...

I guess ultimately, a car "is" whatever the manufacturer called it; but I find a lot of magazine writers and other "buffs" being kind of fast and loose with their terminology...

[Guest bkazmer]

I agree with Frank. The distinction between a convertible club coupe and a convertible victoria seems hazy to me. Also, the folding rear seat versions were often called opera coupes

[Guest De Soto Frank]

Forgot the Opera Coupe...

Oh, and the Landau...

(The possibilities are endless...!)

[1937hd45]

Frank, Don't forget the Ford A-400, and 1932 B-400.

[West Peterson]

A cabriolet and a convertible coupe are not the same. The cabriolet is the same as a convertible victoria. They would both have a back seat.

[1937hd45]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">A cabriolet and a convertible coupe are not the same. The cabriolet is the same as a convertible victoria. They would both have a back seat. </div></div>

WHAT???????? Say that again, and use Model A Fords as an example.

[West Peterson]

As DeSoto Frank says, whatever a car company calls it, that's what it is. Just as the Model A Cabriolet is actually a convertible coupe, the Cadillac All Weather Phaeton is just a convertible sedan, and the Cord Phaeton is a convertible victoria.

[Guest De Soto Frank]

And, as I was reminded of in a preceeding similar post, the Model T Ford "Couplet"...

"A rose by any other name..."

[Guffin]

Volkswagen sold a model of the Beatle called Limousine!!!

[West Peterson]

Limousine in Europe, many years ago anyway, was merely a sedan. It did not necessarily mean it had a division window and/or jump seats.

And of course, remember the more recent Lincoln Town Car, which was anything but... and the current Volkswagen Phaeton. The rape of body style nomenclature is almost as bad as the glorious model names that are pasted on current four-door sedans (as good of cars as they may be), such as the 300/300C, GTO, Magnum, Charger, et al. Good grief, take a lesson from Ferrari and kill the name when the configuration takes a significant change. Camaro/Firebird, for instance, should have dropped the name(s) in 1970, Eldorado in 1967, etc.

[stexch]

So what's the difference between a phaeton and a town car?

[Guest imported_tigermoth]

ok, i have been curious about what a vicky is. is it a 4 passenger coupe? or what? thanks, tom

[1937hd45]

A Victoria is basicly a sexy looking Tudor, with a shorter turret top and bussel back, most are 5 passenger vehicles.

[Aanderson44]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">A cabriolet and a convertible coupe are not the same. The cabriolet is the same as a convertible victoria. They would both have a back seat. </div></div>

Uh, slow down there for a moment! You are rather assuming that somehow, the definitions of body styles are somehow finite, as a zero-sum game. If one goes back to the European cars of the twenties, one can find any number of Cabriolets (or Kabriolet's in Germany) that were cars without a second, or rear seat. Even Hebmuller, the German coachbuilder who did the first drop-top Volkswagen Beetles in the early 50's, referred to their convertible (a two-place car, BTW) as a Kabriolet.

Just as carmakers (and the public) struggled with what to call the newfangled contraptions that rolled down the street without benefit of a horse out front in the very early days (it took several years before the term "automobile" came into common usage), carmakers had to find ways of describing the various body styles to the customer, beginning with the very earliest days of the automobile (just what in the hell is a Voiture or a Voiturette? I dunno, and somehow my French friends aren't in complete agreement either!)

A Landau, for example, in horse-drawn carriage terms, refers to the style of open carriage with folding top developed in the late 18th century in Landau, Germany--but I challenge anyone to find an automobile body anything like a horsedrawn Landau. The Sedan, before the automobile came along, was a one or two passenger box, carried first on the strong backs of slaves/servants, not even a wheeled vehicle (the sedan chair). Even a Victoria carriage has seating for at least 4, the two bench seats actually facing each other (how many automobile Victorias ever had that manner of seating (and I am not referring to folding jump seats here!).

Anyway, back to automobile body terminology: The earliest two-place open cars tended to be called roadsters, simply because they did resemble the roadster-style buggies then common. Early roadsters with an added back seat likewise tended to be called a Tonneau, as the rear seat was added above a box-like structure behind the front seat, which the French politely described as a Tonneau (one has to wonder that if the French used the female term for that rear appendage, would we have wound up seeing such cars described as Derriere's? ) Early closed cars (fully closed rear seating area, with open driver's seat having a fixed roof overhead) were often called touring cars in Europe, England and in the US), and open cars with front and back seats evolved for a time to being termed Phaetons (pretty much following the carriage term for such a body style) the name Phaeton coming back into use in the "Classic Era" of the late 20's through the 30's. However, somewhere along the line, our often populist way of terming such things as body styles took the term "Touring Car" and applied it to open cars with front and rear seat, regardless of whether there were jump seats or not (Ford Motor Company never advertised a Model T Phaeton that I've ever seen! And the Model A open 5-place cars were advertised as touring cars through 1931). Beginning with the Model B/Model 18 in 1932, Ford advertised this body style as a Phaeton, and Phaeton it remained through the end of the body style in 1937-38, and those cars surely had no jump seats.

Cars having just one bench seat (or seating for two persons side by side) with folding tops and either framed upper doors or a folding B-post were from the beginning termed Cabriolets after the horse-drawn carriages of the same name (perhaps the only pure translation of a carriage name to an automobile, IMHO), then as wheelbases stretched out to almost ungainly proportions in the 20's, the addition of a back seat in an otherwise close-coupled body (having pretty much the body contour of a coupe or cabriolet but just two doors), they became, in the eyes of numerous manufacturers, a "Club Cabriolet", which incidently the later 40's through 70's convertibles really are, even though the folding B post gave way to frameless rollup side windows.

By the middle 20's though, "Madison Avenue" (you know, the advertising agency thing) came about big-time, and suddenly, terms get munged severely. What is a Berline but a fancy name for an ordinary four door sedan? What is a convertible coupe but a cabriolet? And, how about the Cord Convertible Phaeton? Little more than a fancy name for a club cabriolet (beautiful car nonetheless). In 1935, Mercedes-Benz had a very distinctive coupe version of the 500K roadster built for Rudi Carraciola which the coachbuilder termed a "Coupe Limousine" (Really now, a limousine with a close-coupled coupe body, seating for just two people, with the world outside behind the "divider"?--Germany's equivalent of Madison Avenue descriptions!).

In 1956, Lincoln-Mercury advertised the new 4-door hardtop from Mercury as a Phaeton (go look it up!), yet in 1951 Ford called their first true "hardtop" as a Victoria (but where is the fixed B-post of a 20's or early 30's Vicky?). And a Crown Victoria at least began life as a two-door fixed top car with a back seat--but has become merely a 4dr sedan since the 1980's from Ford. At least when introducing the first production hardtops, GM's Harley Earl was pretty correct in insisting they be called "Sport Coupes" (which term was used in GM advertising through the late 60's for this body style), as a sport coupe was to him, a pillarless body style developed for the Southern California market in his early days at Earl & Anthony Coachworks in Los Angeles and later at Don Lee.

And, Lincoln's Town Car does revert to the early description of a "Town Car" in that it does have a fixed roof (with the additional comfort of roll up windows) over the front seat.

Summing up, body style names began as a way of describing to the customer what the car was, in terms that he could understand in those early days, later evolving into somewhat fanciful terms, their purpose being to give some modernity to what otherwise would have been seen as archaic in an age of ever-increasing modernism. Given this, I do think it is probably more appropriate to always describe a body style or shape in terms of what the manufacturer called/calls it, rather than to try arbitrarily to call it something which it really isn't--there was, and still is, far too much variety in naming car bodies.

Phew! I better go take a shower after working up such a sweat, huh?

Art

[allcars]

Mercedes-Benz typically offered multiple Cabriolet styles on many series during the 1930s. In one brochure recently offered on eBay, the Cabriolet "A" was described as a convertible coupe with no rear seat and door windows only. Cabriolet "B" was more like what we think of as a modern convertible, with rear-quarter windows and a rear seat. Cabriolet "C" was, I believe, a 2-door 5-passenger convertible with closed rear quarters and a rear seat. Cabriolet "D" was the 4-door convertible style. All of the Mercedes brochures I've seen spell "Cabriolet ? with a "C," even when written in German. I also have seen an ad from a 1933 Berlin newspaper for the 1933 Chevrolet with Glaser Cabriolet body, again spelled with a "C" and not a "K."

[Restorer32]

Then there is the XK series of Jaguars where the convertible coupe is called a "Drop Head Coupe" while the roadster was referred to as an "OTS" or "Open Two Seater".

[Restorer32]

Not to mention the Bentley "Sedanca Coupe", which is a 4 passenger coupe with a retracting "roof" over the front seat.