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Old 22 Oct 2008, 12:00 (Ref:2318248)   #1
Speed-King
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The demise of the FWD-Coupé

So what happened to all these pseudo-sporty coupes like the Calibra, Cougar, Integra or Celica? Ten or fifteen years ago there was a plethora of FWD-coupés on the market, but nowadays all "cheap" performance cars (i.e. the typical young man's cars) seem to be boring hot hatches.
I know that it was a somewhat pointless class of cars, but I must say, that I miss these poor man's sportscars and some of my alltime favourite racing cars were derivatives of these kind of vehicles, like the AAR Celicas in IMSA GT or the awesome Calibras in the mid-90s DTM and ITC-series.

With the current pony car revival, I'd would've expected a revival of Europe's answer to the pony cars, i.e. the Capri or Manta. The only thing we've got so far is the Scirocco, and that's just another hot hatch.
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Old 22 Oct 2008, 12:10 (Ref:2318261)   #2
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Lagune Coupe is coming. That has potential.

I guess the whole industry is changing at the moment, the average family car is moving away from a sedan shape and into a sedan sized hatch shape (see Focus, Impreza, C4, etc). So coupe versions of those mightn't be as easy to 'spin off'.
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Old 22 Oct 2008, 12:22 (Ref:2318267)   #3
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We seem to have revisited the 80s in some ways, whereby much of the one time fwd coupe market has reverted to hot hatches, with one or two hatch based exceptions such as the new Scirroco and BMW 1 series.
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Old 27 Oct 2008, 06:05 (Ref:2321510)   #4
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I think the 2 components of the cheap coupe market have separated slightly - people after a fast car back into hot hatches, and people after a stylish car into the coupe convertibles - which with a rebadge and perhaps slight restyle are basically all different enough from their base to become a separate model. The industry seems to be a bit more cutthroat now too, which would make a robust, profitable business case for these cars a bit more difficult to achieve. I'm talking about the last 5-10 years here too, not just the current climate.
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