I’ve been reading about the Jacques Coune Berlinette MGB. This car was originally a roadster. The Coune design was considered for construction by BMC, but it was ‘too Italian-looking’ according to the book I have. BMC went for the Pininfarina-designed GT instead. Personally I think they made the wrong decision.
In a 1967 issue of Road & Track there is an ad for the Mustange Bertone (link to eBay ad for a R&T with it on the cover).
The Coune body added two-thirds the price of the new MGB to the finished product. The Mustang is listed in the ad at $10,000, which I assume is the whole car.
General Question: Are there any coachbuilders out there nowadays? I don’t mean kit-car manufacturers that allow the builder to put a different body on his Corvette or old VW Bug (interesting VW Beetle commercial here). I mean, are there coachbuilders who modify new cars as they did with the MG and Mustang mentioned above.
IMHO: There are lots of new modified cars on the road. I’m thinking primarily of ‘hot hatches’. It seems to me that these are performance modifications, with body mods being funky wings and spoilers and wheels. There are also shops that do one-off bodies for a great deal of money. But I don’t recall seeing ‘coachbuilt cars’ – cars that are sent out for special bodies from new. Why not? Is it just the expense? Or is there just no interest in them?
Again, let me attempt to clarify: I see a difference between one-off custom cars, kit cars, and coachbuilt cars. The first is a partnership between the consumer and a body shop. The second is a partnership between the consumer and the kit body maker. The last is a little bit murky. In the case of the Coune MGBs some customers bought basic cars and had them modified. But some were bought by the Belgian MG distributor and delivered for modification from new. So I’m using ‘coachbuilt cars’ as to mean a partnership of sorts between the factory or distributor and the coachbuilder.
In any case, this post is really a GQ: Are there still coachbuilders as I have attempted to describe them?
Criminy. The title should be Coachbuilt cars. Will a mod please change that for me? Thanks.
Well, according to the Wikipedia article on coachbuilders, “the advent of unibody construction made custom coachbuilding impossible. Many coachbuilders were purchased by automobile manufacturers and merged with their vehicle operations. Others became contract vehicle assemblers, building niche or localized cars for larger companies.”
The MGBs were always unibody construction.
I can think of Pininfarina and Karmann when it comes to contract assemblers for larger companies. I guess this sort of answers my question. Only what I was really thinking of was not ‘This car was styled by Pininfarina’, but ‘This is the standard mass-market offering. But we also offer this car, which is the same but with a coachbuilt body’.
Saleen could be classed as a couchbuilder, since they buy Mustangs and customize/hop them up. Many of the high end car makers, like BMW and Mercedes offer coachbuilding services. You go in, sit down with , a sales rep and pick out the features you want for your car. I think that the answer to your question is that there are companies out there which do the same job as coachbuilders once did, but they’re not generally called that.
I’d been wondering what a ‘Saleen’ was. I’ve seen a few of them, and they pretty much look like an ordinary Mustang.
They do a little more than that. They build their own supercar, which will set you back about $1 mill. I don’t know about it’s performance, but a coworker of mine has a Bullitt Mustang and it easily beats Saleens, even though it sold for half the cost of a Saleen. The guy trying to revive Studebaker (and is selling reskinned Mustangs as Avantis) could be considered a coachbuilder, so could the company in Atlanta (can’t remember the name, begins with a “P” IIRC) that reskins Mustangs and turns them into high perforamce cars.
Lots of small companies use ‘big three’ parts in their cars. The corvette suspension and powertrain are really popular what was. Noble and Ariel use Toyota motors, another company that escapes me used C5 Corvette parts with the exception of a Porsche Transmission.
Callaway had the C12 which started out with a Corvette, then changed damnear everything.
Pininfarina and Zagato are still up for this sort of thing.
Consider the new Ferrari built for James Glickenhaus.
Aren’t most hearses coachbuilt? And stretch limos?