Wikipedia defines a Coupe as: "Coupés are often sporty variants of sedans, body styles with doors commonly reduced from 4 to 2, and a close-coupled interior offering either two seats or 2+2 seating."
Let me do a pictorial explanation for you in case you are still confused.
This IS a Coupe
This is NOT a Coupe
This IS a Coupe
This is NOT a Coupe
Just because a SEDAN, whether traditional or Crossover SUV, has a raked roofline doesn't make it a Coupe. If this were true, the floodgates would open and you could include all sorts of other vehicles to the list. I thought this was an opportunity to do some direct comparisons with actual Sedans. I scaled each car so that all the green houses were approximately the same size to see the similarities.
The Mercedes CLS is always in red.
1. CLS vs. 2008 Nissan Maxima
2. CLS vs. 2008 Pontiac Grand Prix
3. CLS vs. 2008 Honda Civic
This illustrates my point well - none of these centerlines are very different. Heck, if I had to choose the most raked and sporty, it would be the Grand Prix! And the economy Civic held up well to the competition with a very sleek roofline as well. These were just a few of the cars I thought of first, there are many more.
Ironically, even Wikipedia has a picture of the CLS in their definition of a "Coupe". My suspicion is this was included simply because Mercedes markets the car this way - not because it's actually a Coupe.
So the next time an OEM tries to tell you they've got this really sporty "Four Door Coupe", tell them they're full of "it" and just call it what it is - a Sports Sedan (or in the X6's case, a Sports Activity Vehicle).
2 comments:
Maybe the new generation car designers are being fed the wrong information here...my humble understanding of a coupe has always been a car with 2 doors, because the engineers figured out (long time ago - hello!) that having 2 less doors will improve with the rigidity of the car structure.
What can you do with the rigid structure of a coupe?
Better cornering, lighter weight, better handling - just to name a few.
Very true. Though the CLS has a very slippery and sleek profile, and has a dynamic gesture, it still has 4 doors. That is a very sporty sedan. Not a coupe.
A coupe has 2 doors, a sedan has 4. Simple as that. Nothing wrong with trying to capture coupe like proportions over a sedan platform, but as long as it has 4 doors, it's still a sedan.
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