Sports coupe

Sport coupé is an unspecified and non-protected term for coupés or station wagons that have been developed from sedans of the middle class or smaller classes and are sporty.

Typical sports coupes were the Ford Capri and Opel Manta models introduced by Ford Germany and Opel in Europe . The vehicles were to copy the idea of the American pony cars in a scaled-down form, analogous to the entire European vehicle range . On the European market, other manufacturers reacted to these models with their own sports coupes (e.g. Toyota Celica , VW Scirocco ). These vehicles are more or less directly derived from the manufacturers' mid-range or compact-class models. Sports coupes are usually more powerfully motorized than the sedans from which they are derived. An extreme case are high-performance vehicles such as the BMW M3 , which offer performance similar to a sports car, but are also based on mid-range vehicles .

Typical sports coupes were also the two-door coupes from Alfa Romeo . From the Giulietta Sprint from 1954 to the Alfetta GTV , which was built until 1986, Alfa also offered the respective middle class as a coupé.

In the 1990s, these sports coupés were replaced by models that had a completely independent body shape, often more reminiscent of sports cars . Examples are the VW Corrado and the Opel Calibra . The demarcation to the sports car is defined more in these models by the lower performance; the utility is often low.

During this time there were also some sports coupés based on small cars, such as Fiat Coupé , Ford Puma or Opel Tigra . They too disappeared after a generation.

The few sports coupés today are mostly based on the concept of the 1990s. An eccentric belonging to this category is the Mazda RX-8 , which has four doors, but the rear ones cannot be recognized as such due to design tricks.