Among the many automotive travesties in the world, there's one that has particularly bothered me of late: The world hasn't had a production four-door convertible sedan in more than 50 years. Yes, we have Jeeps and Range Rovers, and the Volkswagen Thing made it all the way to the 80s. But a big luxury boat with nothing but sky for a ceiling? We haven't seen one of those since the slab-sided, suicide-door-equipped Lincoln Continental was introduced in 1961. Or, as it's also known, the Entourage car.
Other than the Maybach Landaulet, the closest we've come recently was Cadillac's absolutely gorgeous Ciel concept from the 2011 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance (shown above). The car was a hit, but much to everyone's disappointment, it was also pure concept and not meant for the assembly line. The Ciel did, however, appear along with a Continental in the movie version of Entourage, which further popularized the allure of a four-door drop top.
With the reemergence of the Continental nameplate from Lincoln, I started wondering if we'll ever get a production four-door convertible again. Not necessarily from Lincoln, but from anyone. Curious, I called up Ed Welburn, General Motors's vice president of global design who oversaw the Ciel's development, to get his take. According to Welburn, it's possible, but the same engineering hurdles that have prevented carmakers from making another four-door convertible for the past half century still need to be cleared.
"When you're doing a convertible, you're taking away a lot of structure," Welburn says. "When you make a four-door convertible, even more of the structure goes away, and the car would flex a lot."
This quandary is why sedans converted to convertibles are compromised. There are ways to deal with this structural flexing, but as Welburn notes, that would require adding a lot of weight to the car. "Your fuel efficiency would really suffer tremendously," he says. "You could design it to meet all the regulations, but at the end of the day, after doing all of that, I think it would be a very, very heavy car—rather cumbersome."
In other words, the end result would be a gas-guzzling tank with the handling to match. So how did Lincoln and other carmakers pull it off a half century ago? Well, there weren't as many regulations for starters, and the engineering benchmarks were also much lower. "You get in one of those older cars, and it's shocking," Welburn says. "It's a totally different world. That was the norm. Every other car handled like that."
But the recent advancements we've seen in lightweight materials and increased rigidity give Welburn—who, it's worth noting, also loves the idea of a new four-door convertible sedan—a bit of hope. "As we have more breakthroughs in materials and that mass comes down . . . if that breakthrough comes, it will happen," he says. "It's not going to happen in the next couple of years, but we'll see."
In fact, Welburn likes the idea so much that he gushes thinking about it. "It just brings a smile to your face when you think of a convertible that size and being able to travel—two couples, I just think of two couples or even a family in something like that," he says. "It's like a wonderful painting. There is nothing edgy or harsh about it at all."
A wonderful painting. How idyllic.
"I would love to do it, but it would be tough," he continues. "I would do everything possible to create the most wonderful two-door convertible. If you did the right two-door, with seats that would slide to make it easy to get into the backseat and that kind of thing, that's what I would do."
Go on.
"Yeah, I'd love to do a four-door," Welburn says. "How do you feel about a two-door convertible of that size?"
Four doors are what I'm after, but until it makes engineering sense, I would feel very good about a CT6-size two-door convertible from Cadillac. This is all just hypothetical talk, of course, but now that the idea is in my head, I think a CT6 convertible is exactly what the world needs. What do you say, Caddy? Surprise us.
