Topless cars are still the most fun you can have with your clothes on
As Europe starts to stack its garden furniture, snuggle into its merino and greet the autumn with a shrug, it’s time that we took stock. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is doing Keats proud. The roads are still dry enough for a few weeks of four-wheeled fun and the sun, when it does appear, shines just warmly enough to remind you of that blazing fatso of a high-summer blob from a couple of months ago. So you think, with a frisson of good-times excitement, “I know: I’ll get out the convertible.” But you won’t, will you? Because you, like almost every other driver, don’t have one. It’s one of the summer’s sadder statistics: people aren’t buying that once-beloved symbol of carefree motoring and summer escape any more.
As temperatures rise and the seasons continue to squabble over the copyright for “spring” and “autumn”, the news isn’t so hot for sales of the head-turning topless model (and we’re using figures from the UK because it is, despite a rainy reputation, easily the keenest top-dropping country around these parts). Last year, just 12,173 new convertibles were registered in Britain – an 87 per cent plummet in sales from Peak Cabriolet in 2004, making last year’s figures the lowest in two decades. The number of models available to buy new has fallen by almost 50 per cent since 2000, meaning that there are currently only 16 convertibles from the top manufacturers with which to decorate your driveway (down from 31 in 2000). You’d have thought that all of those lockdown puppies, now grown into stinking great Bernese mountain dogs, would need a little more wind-assisted ventilation.
Why have convertibles fallen out of favour? Is it that it’s actually too hot to have the top down in the summer? No way: wear a hat. Could it be the irresistible rise of SUVs? Sales of these family hatchbacks with a nasty whey-powder problem have risen a seemingly steroid-assisted 543 per cent since 2020. Big, bland models have also ushered in the creeping gadgetification of cars – vehicles built more along the lines of smartphones than machines, things of touchscreen serviceability and glassy anonymity. Or maybe it’s the fault of EVs, whose fortunes have ridden a bumpy yet inexorably rising road – with their bulky batteries and built-in vibe of eco-censoriousness, they don’t quite conjure the wonder of going for a spin, just for fun. Then again, there are plenty of alternatives to an electric shopping trolley. I spent a week grinning my way through northern Italy in a convertible electric Maserati last summer and it was so fast and fun that it also had me weeping quietly on a snaking strada provinciale on the outskirts of Carrara. So bloody hell – just cut off the roof.
It used to be different, didn’t it? I remember sliding around Goodwood in my uncle’s Morgan, a wood-framed beauty that felt as organic as its materials, and careening around St George’s Hill in the first MR2, the little Toyota that looked as though it was made of Lego. You put the roof in the boot and had to lay your tennis racquets across your legs. Design genius. My wife and I drove a roofless Mustang down Route 1 from Miami to Key West the day after we were married; the warm Florida air dried our tears of joy. Or was that the hangover? Either way, driving alfresco is just a gearchange away from getting frisky.
If you happen to have a little in reserve, saved for a rainy day, do as they do with any endangered species and adopt a drop-top. There’s such a wealth of high-value fun to be had in investing in fresh air and the future – you did, in fact, save it all for a sunny day.
Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
