Last week we covered business coupes in our running body styles series. The business coupe was described as a “no-frills” basic two-door car with no backseat. The car makers designed these models for traveling salesmen that carried wares or samples and not passengers.
When you took the basic design of a business coupe but added a large rear seat for passenger accommodations, you now had a club coupe. These coupes later morphed into what we call a two-door saloon today.
As much as we wished there were black and white rules on what constitutes each type of coupe, the lines tend to be gray and rules changed frequently between the auto makers. There is even differences over time on what the term coupe means. Currently the Society of Automotive Engineers claim that two-door coupes have less than 33 cubic feet of rear seat volume. Anything more is a sedan.
The Hemmings Classic Car guide defines the club coupe as “a two-door with two rows of seating and a trunk, smaller than a sedan in the same lineup for comparison, generally having a fixed B-pillar, and a rear seat farther forward than in a comparable sedan. Also called Close-Coupled Coupe.”
Generally speaking, the profile of a two club coupe body style were typically lower and longer than the sedans. They had a sportier look than the two-door sedans that shared an identical body profile to the four-door sedans in the same lineup. We hope that clears up the terminology a bit.
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