Last night, we reported on a new –um, we’ll call it a car, sure – that was called Roadster. The Roadster that was shown was, and I want to make this very clear, not a roadster. This is because words have meanings, specific meanings, and while words can evolve and change over time, you can’t just change the meaning of words arbitrarily. That’s not how language works. And the word “roadster” does not mean what that car called a Roadster is.
Words matter! I feel like we’re already in danger of losing the fight for the word “coupé” which is – and I want to make this abundantly clear – a two door car. If it has four doors, it’s not a coupé. In much the same way, a roadster has a clear definition: it’s a small, open-topped car.
The open-topped thing is a big deal! It may be the biggest deal, the whole raisons d’etre of the car itself! It’s open! Here’s how I described roadsters in our definitive taxonomy of sports cars, which is, I believe, ratified by the UN or UNESCO or the National Bureau of Weights and Measures or something as the official guide to such things:
Roadster:
Perhaps the first true category of sports car. Quite small, open-topped, power is less important than the overall handling and driving experience, which leverages the small size and light weight to create a very visceral and connected experience. Sometimes the power can be comically low, like how a Bugeye Sprite makes only 43 horsepower.
Examples: 1898 Bollée, Mazda Miata, Toyota MR-2, Porsche Boxster, Speedster, 914, MGB, Austin-Healey Sprite/3000, Triumph Spitfire/TR series, Crosley Hot Shot
Sure, you can add a hard top onto a roadster, and there may be some variants with closed roofs, but fundamentally, a crucial aspect of roadsterhood is the openness.
See what’s going on there? In a roadster, you can drive somewhere and have a comfortable, casual conversation with the local honeys that are roaming all around you in their swimwear. This is because in a roadster, you’re not inside your car so much as you’re out in whatever environment you’re driving in. Being in a roadster is like going for a walk, just much faster and more fun, and you can bring a friend. Like our friend Mr.Tweednuts here, in his Austin-Healey:
That’s prime roadster behavior right there; sure, they usually have some kind of top, should it rain or hail or whatever, but you only would put up the top because you absolutely had to, because, again, the point of a roadster is not to be ensconced in some little travel pod, it’s to be whizzing along through wherever you are, seeing everything, smelling the world, catching peoples’ envious eyes, all of that.
Not crammed, alone, in a little wedge-shaped box that can flip around with reaction-control rocket jets to the point where your drink dumps onto the headliner and you puke on your own pants, then face.
How are you going to see wild herds of polo-centaurs if you’re cooped up in some closed car? You’re not, that’s how. Real roadsters make this happen, because, again, they are open.
Look at this little MG! Prime roadsterhood! And what’s going on in this picture, anyway? Did British Airways once offer a roll-on/roll-off service for small roadsters? Drive on the back of the plane in Liverpool, drive off in Paris or Milan or Pisa? That sounds pretty fun.
Also, I had to include this famous Triumph Spitfire ad/brochure image because I always thought it sent the wrong message. Even if we ignore the somewhat misogynistic notion that the lone woman doesn’t care about the workings of the car, when I see a group of dudes clustered under the hood of a British car, my assumption isn’t that they’re all admiring the engine, but rather wondering Why the Hell Won’t This Thing Start? or something along those lines, maybe Should That Wire Be Smoking Like That or Is It Normal For That SU Carb to be Dumping All That Petrol on the Exhaust Manifold?
Anyway, the Tesla Roadster is not a roadster. Words have meanings. Anyone who has a problem with this can go, as my dad used to say, scratch.
Top graphic image: Triumph
Amen. So say we all.
Tesla calling a car the Roadster is controversial. Harley-Davidson called a motorcycle the Roadster. Somehow, the automotive world survived. Not that it matters, but I’m not interested in either brand.
Well the Harley doesn’t have a roof, does it?
I always thought roadsters had no top at all, like a front-engined Indy Car.
Some have tops that meet some loose definition of top, but more importantly have drain holes in the floor to prevent rust.
A roadster has no side windows and has a removable or fold-down windshield.
Or at least has a removable windshield.
for example
NO side windows and has a removable windshield..MGTC TD, TF, MGA
TR3
Bugeye Sprite, Sprite Mk II
Porsche Speedster
Jeep?
HAS side windows and has a removable windshield.
TR4, 4a, 5, 250, and 6
Sprite Mk III
MGB
Non-removable windshield and roll-up side windows? Those are convertibles or cabriolets
Ooo, hard core. I’m digging the Uber purity.
Have you ever taken the windscreen off of a TR4? It is not an easy task. I guess it is easier than reinstalling it.
My TR4 currently has removable side windows. Glass setting tape should fix that.
I think a jack or turnbuckle helps.
I never owned one but a friend who did claimed it was a two person job. One person drives very slowly and the other removes the screen.
Or you could invite a bunch of friends over to grab hold of the car and shake it. The first alternative makes a better story.
He put a Brooklands screen on his.
I can’t remember how he made is legal in New York State , I think having a brother in law who was a state trouper may have been the work around.
He also drove like maniac despite having his left arm amputated just above the wrist after trying to fire an 18th century canon using smokeless powder.
I wonder if he’s still alive.
Wow! I’ll bet that friend has some stories to tell!
It is a two person job. The hardest part was accessing the clamp bolts high up inside the fenders. We struggled for quite some time trying to remove the windscreen before we found those. They are accessed from inside the passenger compartment and are mostly hidden behind the edge of the dash panel. The nuts on the end of the threaded rod that holds the ends of the windscreen down were the easy part.
How do you remove an MGB windshield? It’s not a fold down windshield either.
Like you, I also think a roadster does not have wind down side windows.
MGB windscreen is a super easy 15-minute job, faster if you do it frequently. The side vents aren’t much more difficult but you have to remove the door cards. If you do it a lot, cutting an access hole in the card would be possible, but if you are putting screen on and off you can probably do without side windows entirely. Or door cards maybe.
But the people who designed the windscreen made easy removal a priority, there isn’t even anything more than a squeegee sealing it to the body. On a 67 or earlier you can’t even tell where the windscreen attached, except for a hole at each end.
Silver City Airways. You could genuinely fly your roadster from England to France. My goodness that must have been expensive.
I agree so, so much. A roadster should be fun and small, open to the air. Definitely two doors and only nominal back seats for a small dog or backpack, if any. This car is not for car pools. It should be somewhat affordable too: the point is not luxury or specs or a huge payday for the CEO or pumping the stock market, it’s having a nice drive through the canyons ideally enjoying the birdsong and the fresh air unsullied by your clean, quiet electric motor. This Tesla stunt was the opposite of what I want from a roadster, and trillions of miles away from the kind of car company and CEO I want to give money to.
We can have a whole other discussion of coupé being used as a sub-model/trim level name on SUVs. Argh. Fastback is right there if you want to describe squashing the headroom in the back and reducing the utility of the cargo area.
top graphic: TR4 or maybe its the TR4A. Lovely, and as most Triumphs prone to break down, but in a Roadster everyone can see you weep or swear trying to start it. Lucas, Prince of Darkness at your service.
That’s a TR4A. It has the marker lights and chrome on the fenders instead of marker lights in the grill. Also, the round bonnet badge.
Weeping in the face of the prince of darkness is a real thing.
I knew someone in the Autopianverse would be able to differentiate, and that makes me smile. Bravo sir bravo
Yep this is completely correct
I was thinking it’s more of a Scrōtster.
words have meaning.
especially to a free-speech advocate like Enron, e.g. “full self driving”.
In China they forced him to rename it, finally some regulators with guts and enforcement power. I’m sure he’s still dreaming of shutting down the US factories and importing every Tesla from the much cheaper Chinese factory like he does in Canada now.
Germany also forced a rename to something factual.
What if it had a rocket propelled retractable roof?
I agree with you on “roadster”, but not on “coupe”. The idea of coupe = 2-door is a product of Detroit retiring the term “2-door sedan” after 1980. Before that, it referred to the shape of the roof, not the number of doors. But marketers saw that a lot of 2-door cars had sloped roofs, they figured, “Hey, let’s just call them all coupes!”
But I might be a little biased, since I’d rather have a 4-series Gran Coupe than a regular 4-series or 3-series and I like the X4/6 over the X5/7.
But was Detroit’s pre-80s use of 2-door sedan vs coupe proper in the first place?
Jaguar was using coupe for both hardtop (fixed-head coupe) and convertible (drop-head coupe) versions of the 2-door XK120/140/160, E-Type, etc., and sedan for the 4-door MK II that had a reasonably similar roofline to the XKs.
I’ll give you Gran Coupe, to me that sounds like a larger sleek fastback hatchback for four people. Not an SUV though. BMW calls its i4 that and it suites it. But I also like Gran Cabrio for Maserati’s large convertible cruiser.
>Even if we ignore the somewhat misogynistic notion that the lone woman doesn’t care about the workings of the car, when I see a group of dudes clustered under the hood of a British car, my assumption isn’t that they’re all admiring the engine, but rather wondering Why the Hell Won’t This Thing Start?
After fixing her wind-swept hair, she’s probably questioning her choice of dating the guy with the tiny unreliable convertible that won’t even start with with 6 guys working on it.
Does Musks compensation follow profits, sales, or share price? We all know the answer. His actions are influenced by incentives. We need to change the rules around incorporation.
I personally laugh at the idea that this will be produced and available in 2028. History is a guide, and I’m thinking in terms of decades here. Say 2038 which assumes we are even still here.
Once Elon gets his Tesla and SpaceX/Grok/Deepfake/Twitter merger he’ll get his trillion dollar bonus without actually having to make Tesla successful and he’ll quit cars and NASA to concentrate on military contracts, satellite services, and his promised robot army.
If he doesn’t croak from a ketamine overdose first.
I’ve drawn a personal line in the sand and will no longer be reading articles that feature said manufacturer. I can’t make the company not exist, but I can also chose to put my head in the sand and ignore them. Which I am doing as of now.
As said in one of my personal group chats this morning. “Not a fucking roadster”
All Elon had to do was figure out a way to mass produce the original roadster without having to buy most of it from Lotus. He could have been selling us all fun little EVs to dart around mountain roads this whole time instead of ugly touch-screen appliances dependent on subscription services. Just think how good a vehicle it could be now if Tesla put the energy and love, with continuous incremental improvements, into it the way Mazda does the MX-5 Miata.
I have seen some of the OG Roadsters on car sale websites, it’s actually not attractive at all with the top up. But still selling for $200,000. A car with about a hundred miles of range and a low top speed.
Also, I had to include this famous Triumph Spitfire ad/brochure image because I always thought it sent the wrong message. Even if we ignore the somewhat misogynistic notion that the lone woman doesn’t care about the workings of the car
I think her look is unrelated to her interest in the car. It is clearly annoyance that there are 6 jerkwads ogling the car instead of one of them using it to get to where they have to go. She is contemplating how many she could kill if she slammed the hood shut.
Yeah that was my read as well, or more likely:
REALLY you’re ignoring ME for this garbage that won’t even start?
I figured it’s just because it’s a sequel to the original “Tesla Roadster”, but it’s very, very far from the spirit of a lightweight and fun-to-drive vehicle. It looks impossible to enjoy as anything other than a wealthy person’s garage ornament. Call it the Tesla Hypercar, or heck, the Tesla Gigacar.
It’s the first time I’ve heard someone call out the “openness” of roadsters, and it makes sense. A sports car can be a closed-off and private thing, but a roadster is open and sociable. When you put it like that, it’s much sadder that roadsters as a category seem to have died off.
Anyways, I have limited grounds to criticize “roadsters”, because my car is apparently a “velocity roadster” despite being so “open” the rear window could be mistaken for half a pair of eyeglasses…
What is this “Velocity Roadster” I tried to google it and got, first a bunch of Restomods from a company named Velocity, and then some weird Exo-framed beast.
The Hyundai Veloster.
Ironically, a closed-off car that isn’t particularly fast, but I like it.
Nice, I’ve always liked those things.
So my Del Sol makes the cut? But maybe not the 86 Cabriolet cause it has 4 seats?
I don’t think the number of seats matters. Jason’s criteria included “small”, but I think a 4-seat car could still be relatively small, lightweight, and open.
If I had an arbitrary seat “cut-off”, it would be 5. No half-seat in the middle of the second row.
You’re doing the Lord’s work here, man!
Ok now we need to have a rundown of the differences between roadster, convertible, and spyder. Because at least one of the cars you mentioned as a roadster are in fact spyders.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it was most recently marketed as a spyder and its two preceding generations were targas, which arguably are as much convertibles as cars with T-tops are. There’s another targa on the list as well.
MR2 is definitely one of them, but my understanding is that mid engine cars are spyders, so Boxster is a spyder, not a roadster.
That would be a pretty handy way to make the distinction but it seems to be honored in the breach, even within a single manufacturer’s range. At Ferrari mid-engined cars like 488s and SF90s get called spiders along with the Roma/Amalfi. The mix between front- and mid/rear-engined cars called spiders along seems pretty even among other carmakers too.
Originalism probably won’t help in this matter. As best I can tell, the term arose because the cars originally called spider resembled spindly, arachnoid-looking horse-drawn buggies:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a20685360/why-convertibles-are-called-spiders/
I’m mostly salty about the targa distinction. If openness is crucial to roadsterhood, a 914 is, in terms of open roof space, probably less of a roadster than my old ‘78 Mark V that had a sunroof the size of a chest freezer lid.
And that makes me all sorts of confused for like the Suzuki cappuccino that could go T-top, Targa, or fully topless. How is that classified??
But yeah I guess it’s more of a marketing thing and they all mean the same thing, but all require some form of top down driving to be possible. But I mean if we can have 4 door SUVs sold as coupes, then this being a roadster is only slightly more offensive.
See also: Triumph Stag, Baur BMWs, soft-window 911 Targas
My Spider is a front engine car, and it’s decidedly a roadster.
Well that’s confusing haha
And speedster. I might in fact argue that the speedster is the ur-sportscar, and the roadster (“Look, it has a body now!”) is a logical next step.
I think the difference between a roadster and a convertible is that if the roadster has a top, it’s a janky affair that requires some assembly (usually alongside the road, in the rain, with cursing) and provides more theoretical than practical weather protection. Roadster side windows are likewise sus: plastic snap-on or screw-on jobs that usually get left in the trunk or garage.
Convertibles have fairly well-engineered tops that are relatively water tight and can be put up or down by one person in less than a minute. Likewise, their side windows drop down into the doors and are made of glass, like normal cars.
It’s evolution…
ape > Neanderthal > Homo Sapiens
speedster > roadster > convertible
Agreed on all counts.
Any body style can be a convertible, cabriolet or spyder/spider, but a roadster is specifically a small convertible sports car, and in more modern times, has been narrowed to a convertible 2-seat sports car, as it’s become impossible to sell teeny-tiny rear seats that can’t fit a crash dummy, like those of an Austin Healey 3000 or Fiat 124 Spyder (which is a roadster AND a spyder). A 911 convertible is a convertible/cabriolet, while a Boxster is a roadster, because the Boxster is a small 2-seater. Some might argue a 370Z convertible is a roadster, and that only depends on whether you consider it small or not.
Spyder has been used by different brands to mean different things at different times, so a Boxster Spyder, for example, is the ultra-lightweight version with the manual bikini top instead of the powered folding top, but in this case it’s a trim level of a roadster, and the name is an homage to the 550 Spyder, which was called a Spyder because it was topless (in Porsche’s case, without a folding or detachable top), but an Italian Spyder (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Fiat) is just the convertible version of a coupe, and in Alfa Romeo and Fiat’s case, a roadster.
The term Speedster came from versions of cars that are designed to be raced top-down, with the windshields cut down or removed for lower drag, such as the 356 Speedster, which compared to the cabriolet has a smaller, rounder windshield, a smaller, more finicky top assembly and much lower/smaller side windows, top-up driving is an emergencies-only affair and it’s really at its best with the whole affair removed.
With the march of time, we’ve realized the human head is less aerodynamic than a cabin, and a roll cage is a really nice thing to have in a race car, so anything with the “speedster” moniker put on it recently is an homage to a past speedster model.
Cars like the Ferrari SP1/2 and McLaren Elva are “true” Speedsters, but the 911 Speedster was always just a cabrio/spider/convertible with an aerodynamic-looking lid over the rear seats as an aesthetic nod to the 356 Speedster. You could call the Caterham 7 a speedster when the windshield is removed, but that’s not a particularly aerodynamic car as a whole, so the credibility of that moniker might be called into question.
Barchettas are cars with a boat-like cockpit, they almost always have no top of any kind, lack a windshield frame, having only A-pillars if anything at all, such that the windshield is otherwise free-standing glass. There may be brands who call their speedsters barchettas or vice versa, and I won’t argue with them, as I think there’s a lot of overlap in purpose and functionality between the two.
The aarchetta category suffers from the same issue as Speedsters, where race cars gained rooves and the term started to be used on roadsters and cabrios as an homage to the Barchettas of yore There have been some true barchettas, like the Huayra Barchetta, but they’re vanishingly rare, just like true speedsters.
From most to least specific, then:
1: A cabrio, a spider and a convertible are roughly the same thing
2: A roadster is a cabrio/convertible/spider that’s also a small sports car
3: A speedster is a cabrio/convertible/spider/roadster with a cut-down or removed windshield and sometimes a more aerodynamic decklid for better high-speed performance with the top down, and a barchetta is a cabrio/convertible/spider/roadster with a frameless, sometimes removable windshield and no cover available for the same purpose.
And for the edge cases:
A 911 Speedster is a cabriolet with a tonneau cover and a trim level name that pays homage to the 356 Speedster.
A Boxster Spyder is a roadster with a trim level name that pays homage to the Porsche 550 Spyder, both are in fact spyders, because both are convertibles, but both are, ironically, using a term that’s less specific and less prestigious than they could, because the Boxster is a roadster, and the 550 is a Barchetta.
A Fiat Barchetta is a roadster with a model name that pays homage to barchettas.
Fiat 124 SPIDER, not Spyder. Source: my driveway.
Otherwise a great comment.
So, fun fact: Italian cars are always “spider” rather than “spyder” because there is no letter Y in the Italian language.
Sincerely, Another 124 Owner
I had no idea. Thanks!
I am having the words fight with my teenage dependents almost daily. Since the “literally” war that was lost to mean the opposite, I am now fighting “bad” (good), “ate” (dressed fancy) “out of pocket” (crazy, not the Gen X traveler meaning) and oh so many others. Words have whatever meaning people want to have apparently.
I quit trying to keep up with the new slang back in the 1990s, but I could always re-read a lot of Shakespeare and Marlow and go all-in for Elizabethan slang if I were looking to amuse myself and baffle others.
Retaliatory slang. I like it. Ask the kids to code switch, they should learn how to communicate with a variety of people.
If the doors have roll-up windows, it’s not a roadster. Roadsters either have side curtains or nothing.
True dis. Roadsters are the tweedy way to convince your plus one to go for a ride, “because we won’t get wet.”
Spoiler alert: you’ll get wet.
Had a TR3A when I was going to school and lived in the U district in Seattle. The soft top was stolen once and the side curtains twice. Eventually got one set of side curtains back, but at that point I had resorted to just using the tonneau cover and wearing rain gear.
Exactly!
Words mean whatever you want them to mean, they’re all just made up.
For example: “I’ve made this amazing roadster” could mean “I’ve financially bullied better minds than mine to make something everyone thought was ridiculous and maybe impossible, but definitely has a hard top and a pressure vessel that’s probably illegal”, or it could mean “I’ve crammed a dead possum up my arse”, you can’t really tell.
Not without checking for dead possums.
And all this time I thought the argument was whether or not a roadster could have a top at all, never mind being a convertible.
Maybe Fraudster was taken?
COTD
So instead of spending all of these years actually developing a roadster, they have instead designed a concept that is not a roadster and is still years off? I don’t get it. Couldn’t they just drop a roadster body on an existing product, price it around $50k, and make bank?
Well to be fair it sounds they’re already charging $50K a pop on cars that don’t even exist. So sure the concept car is silly but the business model of finding a way to get (some very specific types of) people to give you money for nothing seems to be working just fine.
I was thinking that Kia should buy the rights of the last concept car (because it looked pretty good!), drop the body on the EV3 platform, and bring back the Koup.
Counterpoint, it did not look good. Mazda should license whatever tech it needs to from whomever for the electric Miata. Make sure it looks identical, not like they inflated it with a bicycle tire pump or made it aggressively hostile with a massive course of testosterone. It should not look like a twelve year old asked ChatGPT to design it.