The ‘CC’ exploded onto the scene, hit 1.3 million annual sales and shrunk to a niche curiosity within just a decade
Today Mazda’s decade-old MX-5 RF is the only coupé-convertible (CC) you can buy. Amazing, really, considering that 20 years ago the market was awash with them.
Mercedes-Benz was to thank – or perhaps blame – for this craze. “The innovative electrohydraulic hard top, dubbed ‘Vario top’, has the ability to transform the SLK from a coupé into a roadster in just 25 seconds,” we explained in 1994, as the firm unveiled an evolution of an earlier roofless sports car concept.
“At the press of a button, the aluminium roofing structure splits just above the rear window and the leading edge of the bootlid tilts upwards. The roof then folds within itself and is stowed in a dedicated well behind the seats. The process is completed with the bootlid snapping shut and the parcel shelf moving into position.”
Mercedes had been thinking about making an affordable sports car since the late 1980s, but it took the roaring success of the original MX-5 to give it the confidence to proceed.
Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com
The design team (led by stalwart Bruno Sacco and prominently featuring future Porsche 911 supremo Michael Mauer) felt that such a car would need a unique selling point and settled on a retractable metal roof.
Two years later, the SLK came to Autocar for road testing and we concluded that, despite it weighing a significant 33kg, “the Vario roof is quite simply the best convertible roof we have ever seen”, playing a major part in making this £30,000 newcomer “the ultimate no-compromise roadster”.
Such affordability for something so stylish and the perceived practical benefits of a hard top combined to make the SLK an instant hit: Mercedes had expected demand for some 30,000 annually, yet sold 55,000 in its first full year.
Suspicions of copying were thus natural when Peugeot previewed a CC in early 1998 and fuelled by the fact that its designer, Murat Günak, had actually worked on the SLK.
Like that Mercedes, the cheesily named 2-0-Heart concept aimed to “narrow the gap between dreams and reality” by offering open-air romance and stylishness atop the mechanicals of an everyday model.
Yet Günak insisted that his baby was no copy. “It’s simply not true, though we expected people would say such things,” he told Autocar. “The truth is that retractable hard tops are very much in the Peugeot tradition. Even the official book of the SLK contained a photograph of our pre-war Peugeot Eclipse.”
Peugeot had in fact been the very first company to put a ‘metallique decouvrable’ into series production, half a century beforehand. Initially based on the 401 saloon, the Eclipse benefited from the ingenuity of Georges Paulin, chief stylist at French coachbuilder Pourtout.
Autocar had noted the increased prominence of cabriolet coachwork at the 1935 Paris motor show, noting: “Where mechanical operation is adopted, a solidly constructed head is frequently employed, the entire head unit being made to lower by means of side links into the boot, the lid of which is automatically raised prior to the lowering of the head.” This took as long as a minute.
Anyway, Günak’s idea came to fruition in late 2000 as the 206 CC. It was no more powerful or agile than the 206 hatchback, but that was never the point, and it proved another winner, attracting more than 70,000 buyers in its first year.
Unsurprisingly, rivals piled in: first the Daihatsu Copen, then the Renault Mégane CC, Vauxhall Tigra TwinTop, Nissan Micra C+C, Volvo C70, Volkswagen Eos, Mitsubishi Colt CZC, Vauxhall Astra TwinTop, BMW 3 Series Convertible, Ford Focus CC…
As such, we reported in late 2006: “Few suspected that the SLK would herald a new genre of cars, but today all the major manufacturers have a flip-top in their portfolio or are preparing one for production.”
Convertible sales were growing rapidly, leading analysts to predict a global market of 1.3 million by 2010. What they couldn’t have foreseen, of course, was an almighty global financial crash that would prevent people from indulging in ‘toy cars’ and maim or kill key contractors (Pininfarina, Heuliez, Karmann), nor the subsequent mad rise of the crossover.
Almost as soon as it had started, the CC craze was over.
