Whatever happened to the two-door car?

By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN

During the 1990s, a certain type of American car that had existed for decades became virtually extinct. Big, inefficient, not very practical but strikingly showy and handsome, they still evoke a certain period of over-the-top American style. These were cars like the Chrysler Cordoba with its “Corinthian leather” seats – roll those Rs like Ricardo Montalbán in the ads – the Buick Riviera, the Cadillac Eldorado and the Oldsmobile Toronado. (Spanish-sounding names were big, too.) Driving one of these “personal luxury cars” made a statement about your superior taste and, also, your carefree lifestyle not requiring the mundane practicality of back doors. There are still two-door cars today, of course, but they’re almost all high-performance sports cars not intended for comfortable cruising. But the forty- and fifty-year-old “personal luxury coupés” can command higher prices from car collectors than their four-door peers, evidence of their continued allure. “I think the term started in the 60s,” Brian Rabold with the collector car company Hagerty, said of so-called personal luxury coupés. “But that was the heyday in the 70s. There were still some offerings, but they sort of started to decline in the in the 80s and 90s.” Long, low and stylish, they were the design and technology showpieces for their respective car brands. In 1986, the Riviera offered the first touchscreen in a production car, according to GM. Car companies could do that because these cars sold in lower numbers, even then, than four-door models. “Because you had lower volumes you could you could afford to put in higher technology,” said Kevin Kirbitz, a former GM engineer who’s now head of the company’s heritage collection. “You commanded a premium price anyway.”