Can Sports Cars Have 4 Doors?

What's in a Word (or two)?

Can four-door cars be sports cars? Yes of course. And no, of course not. It all depends on your definition. 'Sportscar' is in the eye of the beholder, and as eyes go, your eye-age may vary. Perhaps the purest proof of sportcarness is in the pudding—if you use your car for competition it is in fact a sports car: a car used for sporting purposes. But if we look deeper things get a bit murky. What if the sport in question is drag racing? What if it's fox hunting—they make a car for that. Let's ignore that sticker Nissan put on Maximas in the '90s (pictured above) and lay down our own criteria along the way—not stopping to solicit opinions from Subaru owners as we go.  

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Are they Fast?

Are there fast four-doors? Unquestionably. Mercedes-Benz makes some of the best, Choose any sedan with AMG as part of its badge and you won’t be wanting for performance. They are fast in a straight line and fast around corners. Faster than many two-doors. A 2018 AMG S 65 has 621hp (and a nearly unfathomable 738 pounds of torque), a late '70s US-spec Triumph Spitfire 1500 puts out 53hp. Which is a more willing enthusiasts' vehicle? You're exposed in a Spitfire, and lower to the ground, but neither of those things is exclusive to sports cars, and neither of them defines the breed. 

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Are they Svelte?

The answer to this question swings clearly in favor of the fewer-doored. You can build a four-door out of aluminum but it's still going to be bulkier than it's two-door counterpart, and with every technological advance giving newer cars the handling abilities of smaller cars comes concurrent advances in safety that usually mean increased heft. Engineers are getting better at applying the laws of physics, but the laws still remain. 

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Are they Pretty?

Get ready to proceed directly to the comments. Here goes: yes... sometimes. But not as often. And the harder they try to look two-door pretty, the sadder the result. Four-door attractiveness is a different kind of pretty. And that's okay. In fact, Lamborghinis have gone from being on every teenager's wall to being the punchline to every joke about slippery shallowness, so there's a lot to be said for a little restraint. There's also a reason why M-B makes their supercars front-engined, and even the gull-wing doors of the SLS are nowhere to be found on new GT C Coupes.  

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Do they Align with Tradition?

With the exception of touring car championships designed around [selling] four-doors, history falls firmly in the two-or-no-door camp. How important history is to how you see the world depends on several factors, not the least of which is how many years of history you've lived through. And like they say in every investment prospectus ever: history is no guarantee of future results. Just as the two-door pickup truck is becoming an endangered species, so might be its cousin the car. In 20 years' time, if there's still such a thing as racing, race tracks could be littered with four-doors, with two-doors being used-up, on display in collections, or merely uncompetitive. 

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Do they Compromise?

All cars are compromises, despite what advertising copywriters all over the world keep telling us. Though we've touched on heft, the nature of vehicles designed, sold, and marketed with seating for 4 or 5 humans in mind typically involves other compromises as well, though when a carmaker builds mostly four-doors but also makes V-8s, V-10s, or even V-12s, we've seen them throw practicality out the window to reach for the performance brass ring. Compromise is a delicate process, and, when done right, can favor a 621hp sedan over a 53hp roadster. 

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Provisional Verdict

Four-doors put up a good fight, but if you're sitting in a bar and the bartender says why the long face "Is that your sports car parked out front?", are you going to say, "Why yes, it is," if you drove there in a four-door, or are you going to assume they're referring to somebody else's vehicle? Likewise, when the board converged a few years back at Porsche HQ and somebody pitched the idea of building a new sports car, did the board members have visions of Panameras dancing in their heads, or something closer to the Boxter? None of this is to say four-doors are in any way inferior to two-doors, any more than saying an Oxford is inferior to a running shoe, just that people might mean running shoe when they say tennis shoe, but they never mean Oxford. Except maybe that guy with an Impreza, or a '93 Maxima. 

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