Fiat, Porsche, MG, Austin-Healey, Alfa Romeo, Datsun, and others around the early-1960s each made small, nimble, four-cylinder roadsters. These cars were roughly the same size and had engines ranging from 850cc to 2000cc. I can’t think of any American roadsters of the same era and in the same class. There was the T-bird, but it was a V8. The Shelby Cobra was also a V8, albeit in a more ‘European’ body than the T-bird. The Mustang was popular, but it wasn’t a roadster and had at least a six-cylinder engine.
Were there any American roadsters along the lines of the European (and Japanese) ones listed?
Would you consider the Nash Metropolitan a roadster? It was at least little.
A friend of mine had an Isetta (sp?) which only had one door. You opened it from the front! Two seater. With a tailwind you could get it up to 30. It would park on a manhole cover. Shitty car. Foreign, though. Definitely not a roadster.
I had a 64 MGB. Wish I still had it. Can’t remember if the MG Midget came before or after that.
All I can even think of from that era was Ralph Nader’s favorite, the Chevy Corvair. Unsafe at any speed.
Hm… Is it a roadster? It’s more like my Herald; a small four seat convertible. OTOH, the Herald is a maneuverable little car, and fairly sprightly with its 1147cc engine. But I’m thinking the Metropolitan and the Herald are not really in the same class as the other roadsters I mentioned. FWIW, the Metropolitan was an American design, but it was built in England by Austin and used the Austin A-series engine.
That sorta rings a bell. I seem to recall the design was a Pinin Farina thing (Italian?), but it’s all from memory so could easily be wrong. There was a brief period when I thought I’d like to own a Metropolitan, but then I switched to wanting an Austin-Healey, then a Triumph TR-3, then an Alfa Romeo Spyder, before settling on the MGB.
If you go by the original definition, then there isn’t any such thing as a roadster being made any more except for Maybe a Morgan. I’ve heard the Miata called a roadster. Didn’t these designations originally come from horse-drawn carriages?
Yes, but I’m wondering about roadsters in the same class as the others; not sixes and V8s. (Note the lack of mention of the Alpine Tiger, which was a V8; though the Alpine would be on the list.)
So were there any American roadsters in the 1950s annd 1960s that are like the examples?
These look like fun little cars, but their performance–especially compared to today’s cars in terms of speed, cornering, nimbleness, etc–would disappoint many of America’s motorists, I suspect. The Porsche roadster reaches about 105-110 mph. The MGB accelerated from 0 to 60 in just over 11 seconds. I’ve got to believe that racing along a highway in an MGB at 95 mph must have been quite an experience.
That said, I’d find them a blast to drive, provided a ginormous SUV doesn’t T-bone me.
Remember the Sunbeam that James Bond drove in Dr. No? At first I thought they were made by the same folks that made the shavers and kitchen appliances and wouldn’t even consider owning one. But they were stout cars, best I can recall.
So I take it there has never been an American four-cylinder roadster in the 1950s/1960s in the 1000cc to 2000cc range? The closest has been the Nash; but it’s really an import and I don’t think it qualifies next to the other cars.
So, it would seem that American cars just tended to be more heavily muscled than European cars for whatever reason. Fuel economy? Maybe road conditions? Just plain cultural preferences? I mean, when the British were flying Spitfires during WWII, we showed up with the P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter so mammothly huge the British pilots joked that an American could hide from the German pilots by running around inside the fuselage of the plane.
The P-47 was a ground attack aircraft. It’s where the current A-10 Thunderbolt got the name from.
And yes, I guess 'Merkins just weren’t big on the small 2 door convertible back then. V8 engines were what made sense. You can see that V8s are experiencing a resurgence today. Traditionally I6 powered cars like the M3 and the new iterations of the Skyline GTR and Supra are all going V8.
Actually, the Mustang was the ground attack craft. They switched roles later in their careers. The P-47 was as big as it was mostly because of the Turbosupercharger that it used, which was rather bulky, but which allowed it to be very big, very fast, and very heavily armed, with much better maneuverability than any German had a right to expect apon looking at the thing.
The Mustang (as it was called by the RAF; the USAAF called it the A-36 Apache) was a long-range, highly agile dive bomber which could fly to a battlefield, dive bomb enemy tanks or troop concentrations, then loiter for a few hours, strafing at anything that looked interesting on the battlefield. They fitted it with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine and got rid of the dive breaks, and then you had the famous long-range fighter plane, redesignated as the P-51B.
The Thunderbolt, owing to it’s ruggedness and heavy armament, just naturally made for a good ground attack craft, to which it was put to excellent use, hence the A-10’s official name.
EDIT: OK, I goofed. The Mustang was a fighter first, used mostly at low altitude, THEN became a dive bomber, THEN became a high-altitude fighter. That’ll teach me to check my sources before I open my mouth.
Hmmm, the first car I owned (in L.A. in 1949) was a 1933 Terraplane roadster. I guess it originally came with a six, but when I got it it had a '48 Hudson straight eight. Hot car.