[LAChevy24]

4-door coupe and 2-door sedan? i know these are terms used, but when i think of coupe i think of 2 doors and 4 doors belong to a sedan. when they say 4-door coupe i know its cause of the greenhouse, but it still is a sedan and i think a 2-door sedan sits four comfortably. i just always found it wierd.

 

[rhvfd10]

Marketing. Just cheesy marketing for unknowledgeable rich people who like new trends.

 

[Bravada]

In the good old days when car bodies were still closely related to horse-drawn carriages, the coupe (the name literally means a "compartment" in e.g. a stagecoach) had only one row of seats - thus a two-door Ford coupe would only feature a seat for the driver and the passenger next to him, while a similar two-door sedan could have rear seat(s) fitted in (in the coupe, the space was used as a cargo compartment or pretty much whatever the driver wanted). We are speaking up to 1920s here, or even 1930s.

 

[drew630]

Thats exactly what I was thinking when I saw the thread about the 4-Door Mercedes Coupe.

 

[darndot]

A Sedan: A closed automobile having two or four doors and a front and rear seat.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/sedan;_ylt=AnjOWdFPaLgzVpugvuRbdBkZvskF

Or
A portable enclosed chair for one person, having poles in the front and rear and carried by two other people. Also called sedan chair .

Coupe: A closed four-wheel carriage with two seats inside and one outside.

 

[BrickTamland]

...It is a source of argument. I had an argument with a person over this once before. We are both very trivial.

I later had an argument with that person over the pronunciation of Jaguar. I think I was on more solid ground that time though, as he pronounced it a nasal-y Jag-wire.

 

[Smaart Aas Saabr]

Typically a sedan is a car body that is a front seats with back seats and a notch-type rear end with trunk.

A coupe is usually a sedan with some length taken out usually in the back. (think French "couper" -> cut)

Something like a GTO would be a 2-door sedan but something like a Firebird a coupe then.

If you look at "4-door coupe" like Mercedes loves to say with the CLS, well in effect it is significantly "cut" compared to say the S-class or E-class. Less rear seat room and a lowered roofline.

But the terms are used pretty loosely.

 

[Neanderthal]

I vote darndot finds a sedan chair for a reader road test.
Write it up, take two aspirin, and call me in two weeks.

 

[Hudson]

Marketing. Just cheesy marketing for unknowledgeable rich people who like new trends.

Not entirely. And the proper pronounciations are "JAG-U-WAR" and "coo-pay".

Enough with the jokes. A coupe is not necessarily a 2-door and a sedan is not necessarily a 4-door, although most of the time they are.

A coupe (the automotive definition as adopted from carriages) will have less head room in the rear seat than the standard model, so many 2-door variants of 4-door cars fit into this category and are therefore 2-door coupes. The latest Mercedes-Benz CLS and Volkswagen Passat CC are coupes, according to this definition.

If the 2-door version of a 4-door model has similar rear seat room, the 2-door is called a 2-door sedan.

Let's not get into the misuse of terms like Brougham, Landau, or Phaeton at this point though.

 

[MonteCarloSS86]

The SAE distinguishes a coupé from a sedan primarily by interior volume; SAE standard J1100 defines a coupé as a fixed-roof automobile with less than 33 cubic feet (0.93 cubic meters) of rear interior volume. A car with a greater interior volume is technically a two-door sedan, not a coupé, even if it has only two doors. Some car manufacturers may nonetheless choose to use the word coupé (or coupe) to describe such a model, e.g., the Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupé

 

[BrickTamland]

I propose to send a bill to the Motoring Organization of Research, Oversight, and Design (MORON), the governmental body of carmakers, stating that from now on all two-door cars are coupes and all four-door cars are sedans so that we may have an end to this debate and carmakers like VW and Mercedes can no longer have these pretentious, ill-conceived marketing schemes that only serve to further muddy the already dirty automotive nomenclature waters.

 

[Bravada]

Not entirely. And the proper pronounciations are "JAG-U-WAR" and "coo-pay".

Amen, Brother Herbert!