Some people can't handle loud drink sippers, toe tappers, or blinkerless drivers. I have this.
Not that long ago, Mercedes-Benz revealed a highly anticipated car, the Mercedes-AMG GT. It is a baby brother successor to the gullwing SLS-AMG and rival to sports cars like the Porsche 911 and Jaguar F-Type. Although the new car does not have the Mercedes trademark doors, I still have an inexpressible amount of desire for the car. It is just an incredibly beautiful coupe.
Mercedes-Benz are masters of making beautiful two-door coupes. They made the legendary 300SL and have made the sleek SL-Class convertible sports cars for many years. In addition to the AMG-GT, Mercedes have also revealed the new S-Class Coupe, the two-door Grand Touring successor to the equally pretty CL-Class.
By long-established standards, the new CLA-Class is not a coupe.
I think they are all gorgeous and I have a hard time thinking of another automaker who can compete with how well Mercedes designs and builds their beautiful coupes.
But the AMG-GT is just one of Mercedes’s new cars. On the other end of the spectrum, the recently started making the CLA-Class, the most inexpensive Mercedes that is targeted at millennials who have a taste for the finer things in life.
By long-established standards, the new CLA-Class is not a coupe. It has four doors. Coupes have two doors. But for some reason, Mercedes has the gall to call the new CLA-Class a ‘four-door coupe.’ “Well what the heck is that, and why don’t they just call it a sedan?” you might be asking yourself, like I am. And I have no good answer for that.
And the CLA isn’t the first car from Mercedes that has been so misnamed. The much more swanky CLS-class may have been the very first car to be called a four door coupe. It was long, sleek and good-looking and had a slightly more gently-sloping roofline than other sedans, and so they decided that they didn’t want to classify it by the same name as your dad’s Toyota Camry.
The plague of the ‘four-door coupe’ hasn’t stopped with Mercedes’s CLS and CLA either.
It has grown to a point of ridiculousness for BMW.
Other companies are hopping on the four-door coupe bandwagon, too. Mercedes’ arch-rival BMW has now launched entire new series of cars based on the idea of the ‘four-door coupe’. BMW attempts to make them sound much more luxurious than regular sedans by calling them ‘Gran Coupes’.
It has grown to a point of ridiculousness for BMW. They recently separated the sedan and coupe versions of the 3-series into the 3-series and the 4-series, respectively. But then, while on their whole ‘Gran Coupe’ rampage, they started making a 4-series Gran Coupe that has no significant difference from the 3 series. The only way you can tell the difference between the two is if you line them up next to each other and squint at the rooflines. And BMW tells us that they are completely different cars.
The best part is, they are fooling people, too! There are people out there right now driving around in BMW 640i Gran Coupes. Why does it have to be so complicated? Why can’t people who want four doors buy the 5-series and people who want two doors buy the 6-series?
I think to label a car as a coupe defines it in a certain way. True coupes put style above practicality. That is why they have two doors instead of four, because it looks better. That is why they are sleeker and sexier. A coupe grab your attention and keeps your gaze until it disappears over the hill. Four doors spoil the flow of the lines and add clutter to the design. The term ‘four-door coupe’ spoils that label.
Mercedes, you are doing a great job. You are building cars that are in my opinion some of the most beautiful cars on the market today. Cars like the SL-class, S-class coupe, the AMG-GT and SLS AMG are the definition of a well proportioned coupe. Long, sleek hoods with short, sloping cabin roofs. Just be sensible about it. Four doors, sedan; two doors, coupe.
