Thanks to the rear-hinged “suicide” door of this DKW coupe, we get to see a lot more of the lovely Anita Ekberg than we would if it was front-hinged. It does make me wonder: was this the only suicide-door hardtop coupe ever made? I suspect there may have been some obscure others in Europe, probably low-volume or coach-built, but at the oment I’m drawing a blank, probably because of that big lamb burger I just had.
So help me out. Can you think of any others?
Since Anita was obscuring the area where the non-pillar would be, here’s a clearer shot of it.
Here’s my detailed write-up of the DKW. FWIW, in my head, I always “say” or “hear” DKW in German, as the English pronunciation seems awkward cumbersome. No wonder they didn’t sell well here.
Rolls-Royce made the pillarless hardtop coupe version of the Phantom with suicide doors from 2009-2016. They currently make the Wraith in the same configuration,
Yep, thought of the Wraith immediately (once I stopped assuming one of these would have to be from the 1950s or 60s 1960s when both hardtops and suicide doors were popular), but had to look online to see if it was a hardtop. It appears to be; does anyone here know if the rear windows roll down? (necessary for full hardtop effect).
I found two photos of the Phantom with its windows down.
So is there any advantage to rear-hinged doors in a hardtop coupe, or is it just to be different? I don’t see it as easing ingress or egress, and it may make it more difficult.
In the case of Rolls-Royce, it’s probably just another way for the elite to point out that they aren’t bound by the laws they impose on the common herd.
Of course. Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t quite conjure it up.
But Anita Ekberg was Swedish! She should have been promoting Volvo’s. Or Saabs if she was a 2 stroke fan. By the way, I’m not a German speaker but VW sounds better to in German to. Somehow, BMW does not, to my American ears.
I don’t know where it is from, possibly an advertisement, but with BMW I immediately think:
‘Bey Em Vay Means Get Out of the Way!‘
Sweden never protected its’ domestic auto industry to the extent other European countries that had them did, and in pictures of its’ street scenes in the ’50s and ’60s you’ll see cars from all over Europe and quite a few American ones.
Halfway cheating: The Peugeot 402 Retractable.
The 1952-54 Peugeot 203 Coupe might be a contender. It was certainly not a coachbuilt special, though they only made just under a thousand — it just didn’t sell well. No B-pillar, however the rear window doesn’t move, so it kind of ruins the effect. And explains why these didn’t sell.
I see the door handle and what I assume is the lock at the front edge of the door, but what is the second button behind the door for? And do I see trafficators (sp?) behind the doors as well? May explain why the window does not roll down, no room.
The thing behind the door is a tiny red and white side marker light. Those were always placed near the trafficator on Peugeots (pic below shows a 203 saloon).
Point of clarification: those are not side marker lights, they are side lights. Despite the similar name, it’s not the same thing. Side marker lights show amber or red light to the side. Side lights show white light to the front and red to the rear. This what you show on the Peugeot is the original kind of side light: a double-face device with a single bulb inside, mounted to the side of the car. For many years now their function has been provided by lamps mounted at the front and rear of the car instead. Formally they’re now called “front position lights” and “rear position lights” except in Britain where they’re still called “front side lights” and “rear side lights” (the term is now an anachronism) and America and Australia where they’re called “parking lights” and “tail lights”.
Thank you Dr Stern!
I only knew the French term for these, which is “feux de position.”
Mais oui! Ça veut dire «position lights».
Thank you both for improving my knowledge. I learn something new here everyday.
That’s beautiful! It’s a cross between a ’41 Plymouth business coupe and a Karmann Ghia, but it works.
Simply love pillarless hardtops, whether they are 4 or 2 door pillarless hardtops. In fact the ‘full’ pillarless feeling is best experienced in a four (4) door pillarless hardtop.
Without question the single ugliest styling feature on a car is the ‘B’ central pillar. The ‘B’ pillar is often finished in flat black in an attempt to hide it, but deleting all together is the way to go.
Mind you, genuine pillarless cars are unlikely to return.
I don’t think hardtops ever went away completely. The RR Ghost is still in production. And big Mercedes coupes were hardtops for eons, no?
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, many DKWs went to the scrapper, because it simply didn’t make sense to restore them while the east german copycat IFA-F9 was so cheap and sold for trifles. Same applies for some BMWs, which were also built in East and West Germany at the same time. This is one of of the reasons why only so very few old DKWs did survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFA_F9
Wouldn’t most DKWs in West Germany in 1989 have either already been preserved classics or otherwise long since gone for scrap?
The IFA F9 wasn’t a copycat so much as a parallel development. The original prewar DKW company was in Saxony and planned to launch the F9 for 1940. It ended up in the Soviet Zone with the intended engine while the company that reconstituted itself in Ingolstadt had access to the original body tooling which had been ordered from a supplier in the Ruhr Valley and completed but not delivered before the war. Both needed to reverse-engineer significant parts of the car.
Weren’t the early , mid sixties Subaru’s equipped with “suicide doors”?
1938 Citroën 11B.
That’s a beautiful car, but it’s not a hardtop in the “no B-pillar” sense of the word.
I my opinion, it is a ‘hardtop’ as clearly it does not have a ‘B’ pillar. Don’t understand your comment?
I agree it’s not a “hardtop” as understood. I just think it’s a lovely blend of art deco and classicism so couldn’t resist posting it. Re the hardtop, hard top & hard-top thing:
https://nihilistnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=hardtop
What’s wrong with Dee Kay Dubya? Um…yeah. No wonder they rebranded when they went to four strokes.
I’ve sometimes wondered why they chose Audi to revive rather than Wanderer which is a near-direct cognate in English speaking markets. Maybe it’s the implication of “wandering all over the road”, or how the double “er” on the end, for those with rhotic accents like most Americans, is onomatopoeic for a bad wheel bearing…
As to Audi, it’s the name of the founder, sort-of. His name was Horch, German for “listen” or “hear”, but after an early kerfuffle with the first incarnation of the company, he started a new one, but as Horch was now taken he named it “Audi”, the Latin for listen (or hark). It was in fact formally Audi (who sold cars under the Horch brand) who merged with DKW and Wanderer to become Auto-Union.
There is no limit to the useless crap I know: for even more excitement, see more below.
According to the ad for this car, the look may have been invented in the ’30’s by Gurney-Nutting. (Man, the piles of useless stored items in my brain, how else to see this post and think “Gurney-Nutting Bentley” and yet my glasses’ location remains a day-old mystery. Need a clearance sale!).
https://us.masonandsons.com/products/1935-bentley-3-1-2-litre-sports-saloon-pillarless-coupe-by-gurney-nutting
my first car, in 1985, was a 1963 ford galaxie 500 a 4 door hardtop version. the rear doors were certainly party trick to watch as the window had to perform an articulated forward drop first , then rear drop and finally front section drop again to fully disappear its glass into a door with a significant notch at rear for the wheel arch. mind you, this was all accomplished with a hand crank. I imagine the mechanical engineer tasked with designing that window mechanism was rightly proud of the results. wish someone would post a video of that mechanism in complete motion.
You’d have to be a total car nut to say “Since Anita was obscuring the area where the non-pillar would be”. Most guys would say “What car?”
+1
. . .also, never thought of it before, but I agree with Paul that DKW rolls off the tongue a lot better in German.
I went to see Belfast in the cinema which has a Standard Vanguard Phase 2 in the opening scene. I was so busy wondering if I’d ever seen one as a kid in Belfast at the time I missed a riot developing in the film and then worried they were going to damage the car. Blame it on Covid
Now that’s one beautiful driver… that coupe is so awesome too. Never sold in Brazil though, where DKWs (mainly sedan and wagon) were assembled, under license if I’m not mistaken. Here DKW was pronounced “DKV”, with a V in place of the W… just like old timers pronounced “BMV”, not BMW!
Long live 2-strokes!
I learned a bit of Portuguese while based in Angola & Mozambique. I’m no expert, but from what I remember, there is no k or w in the version of Portuguese spoken there.
I never encountered a DKW in Africa. Among the other obstacles to selling a DKW in Brazil, dealing with an alphabet that omits 2 of the 3 letters of your car name must have been a challenge.
Reminds me a bit of Hyundai (현대). Most westerners just can’t get their tongue around that 1st syllable.
You’re right Rob, there’s no k and w in portuguese alphabet.
“Among the other obstacles to selling a DKW in Brazil, dealing with an alphabet that omits 2 of the 3 letters of your car name must have been a challenge” yeah good point, and I’d bet they never tried to explain from where the three letter brand name came from …
Not sure if it’s easy to explain to anyone why Dampf Kraft Wagen is powered by a two stroke.
Maybe kid them that the exhaust smoke is really steam?
I ‘m from Southern Brazil where DKW was a best seller before WW2, due to a large community of German descendents. We always pronounced the name as “Deh – Kah – Veh”. The brand came back in 1956 as a local production but everybody kept the older voicing. And BMW (there were a few 1930 units around) sounded “Beh – Em – Veh”. Nowadays the American influence has turned things around and if you use the German pronunciation people will say it ‘s wrong. By the way, “k” and “w” were recently accepted in the Brazilian alphabet.
“Reminds me a bit of Hyundai (현대). Most westerners just can’t get their tongue around that 1st syllable.”
You hear a lot of variations in British and Aussie shows – high-un-day, hyoon-day and so on. Americans almost always treat the y as silent because when they first launched here the ads explicitly said “rhymes with Sunday”.
My parents taught me to say Folksvagen and dey kay vay but were fine with VW or BMW, never realised how incongrous that was until now.
Please don’t call my van a Volx Wagon though.
Neat looking bot how reliable or lasting were they ? .
-Nate
OK, not an exact answer to the question but I immediately thought of the Sunbeam-Talbots saloons of the 40s and 50s. The rear doors on these cars hinged at the rear, and it gave the impression of a “rear hardtop” as there was no fixed post between the door and the roof.
I just caught part of “My Classic Car” on PlutoTV. There was a ’49 Bentley with a French body (I missed who) that was a 2 suicide-door hardtop. I didn’t hear if it was the original body.