Daily Slideshow: Can Sports Cars Have 4 Doors?
Are sedans/saloons ever sports cars? If you polled 10 people and asked them to answer with a simple Yes or No, what would their answer be?
1. What's in a Word (or two)?
Can four-door cars be sports cars? Yes of course. And no, of course not. It all depends on your definition. 'Sportscar' is in the eye of the beholder, and as eyes go, your eye-age may vary. Perhaps the purest proof of sportcarness is in the pudding—if you use your car for competition it is, in fact, a sports car: a car used for sporting purposes. But if we look deeper, things get a bit murky. What if the sport in question is drag racing? What if it's fox hunting—they make a car for that. Let's lay down our own criteria along the way—not stopping to solicit opinions from Subaru owners as we go.
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2. Are they Fast?
Are there fast four-doors? Unquestionably. The Panamera Turbo S E Hybrid is one of the fastest. Choose any Merc sedan with AMG as part of its badge and you won’t be wanting for performance either. They are fast in a straight line and fast around corners. Faster than many two-doors. A 2018 Panamera Turbo puts out 550 hp and 567 lb-ft of torque, a late '70s US-spec Triumph Spitfire 1500 puts out 53 hp. Which is a more willing enthusiasts' vehicle? You're exposed in a Spitfire, and lower to the ground, but neither of those things is exclusive to sports cars, and neither of them defines the breed.
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3. Are they Svelte?
The answer to this question swings clearly in favor of the fewer-doored. You can build a four-door out of aluminum but it's still going to be bulkier than it's two-door counterpart. With every technological advance giving newer cars the handling abilities of smaller cars, comes the concurrent advances in safety that usually mean, sadly, increased heft. Engineers are getting better at applying the laws of physics, but the laws still remain.
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4. Are they Pretty?
Get ready to proceed directly to the comments. Here goes: yes... sometimes. But not as often. And the harder they try to look two-door pretty, the sadder the results. Four-door attractiveness is a different kind of pretty. And that's okay, though some makers have more of a knack for it than others. As it stands, reports like this one from Car and Driver start out along the lines of, "No matter what you think about the Panamera’s styling..." But on the other hand, Lamborghinis have gone from being on every teenager's wall to being the punchline to every joke about slippery shallowness, so there's a lot to be said for a little restraint.
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5. Do they Align with Tradition?
With the exception of touring car championships designed around [selling] four-doors, history falls firmly in the two-or-no-door camp. How important history is to how you see the world depends on several factors, not the least of which is how many years of history you've lived through. And like they say in every investment prospectus ever: history is no guarantee of future results. Just as the two-door pickup truck is becoming an endangered species, so may be its cousin the car. In 20 years' time, if there's still such a thing as racing, race tracks could be littered with four-doors, with two-doors being used-up, on display in collections, or merely uncompetitive.
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6. Do they Compromise?
All cars are compromises, despite what advertising copy writers all over the world keep telling us. Though we've touched on heft, the nature of vehicles designed, sold, and marketed with seating for four or five humans in mind typically involves other compromises as well, though when a carmaker builds mostly four-doors but also makes V-8s, V-10s, or even V-12s, we've seen them throw practicality out the window to reach for the performance brass ring. Compromise is a delicate process, and, when done right, can favor a 550 hp sedan over a 53 hp roadster.
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7. Provisional Verdict
Four-doors put up a good fight, but if you're sitting in a bar and the bartender says why the long face "Is that your sports car parked out front?", are you going to say, "Why yes, it is," if you drove there in a four-door, or are you going to assume they're referring to somebody else's vehicle? Likewise, when the board converged a few years back at Porsche HQ and somebody pitched the idea of building a new sports car, did the board members have visions of Panameras dancing in their heads, or something close to the Boxter? None of this is to say four-doors are in any way inferior to two-doors, any more than saying an Oxford is inferior to a running shoe, just that people might mean running shoe when they say tennis shoe, but they never mean Oxford. Except maybe that guy with an M5, Impreza, or a '93 Maxima.
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