What you're looking at, is the four door Skyline R34 that was sold exclusively in Japan. Wait.. wasn't Skyline the supercar bashing two door super GT sports car? Yes, essentially it is, but this one was equipped with a 2.5 litr single turbo engine, and with four doors, it gave buyers a unique combination of the practicality of a 4 door saloon, but with profiles and looks of a sports car.WAIT... wasn't Mercedes Benz who pioneered the 4 door coupe with the Vision CLS Concept in year 2003?
Well to put some reasoning into perspective, the engineering department of Mercedes Benz did not invent this particular type of automobile, as the Japanese have done it 10 years back with the Skyline, the Integra, and so on, lengthening what was essentially sports coupes, retaining their sporty intent, added another 2 doors for rear passengers, more leg room and comfort. Sound familiar? Yes, but have we heard of 4 door coupes back then? Nope. Why so now?
As marketing people had again infiltrated the engineering department, telling us something we've already know, coining a new term to it, and makes all of us believing that we needed something like that.
Of course, what Mercedes had done, which spawns other lame attempts from the likes of Volkswagen, taking a nice Passat, adding a sloping roof line and calls it a Passat CC (4 door coupe), and of course Audi's upcoming A7, and BMW's currently codename PAS, which was essentially a 5 Series with a sloping rear roof hatch to all join in the 'new segment' of 4 door coupes.
Yes, I'm bashing them, but not for the excellent cars they've created, but rather the excessive marketing exercise they've put into, as the CLS is a perfectly good looking sedan, in fact one of the most beautiful cars of modern Mercedes Benz history, and I'm plenty sure that the A7 will be a sleek looker as well, however, how much will it help telling people these are coupes? Moreover, COUPEs are two door sports cars! SPORTS CARS! How can you call passenger cars with a sloping roof is a coupe? Hang on a minute, isn't the Honda Civic somehow a 4 door with a sleek, sloping roofline as well? Oh, perhaps the marketing team hadn't thought of calling it a 4 door coupe, of which, its still selling like hotcakes.
Well of course I'm not saying 4 door passenger cars shouldn't embrace the god given rights of coupes for a sporty profile, and even if you don't have all the slopy curvy lines of a Mercedes, doesn't mean you can't project the notion of 'sporty' into your design language, take a look at this beautiful Lincoln Continental from 1965, it has four doors, but hell it screams luxury and sporty, does it come with those lame marketing ploys? Nope. Pure design, pure delivery of material.So, are those slew of Porsche Panameras, Aston Martin Rapide, Lamborghini Estoques rubbish marketing gimmicks? Nope. There's a fundamental difference between these thoroughbred supercars with four doors to those lame VW CCs and Audi A7s, thou its without denying that the popularization of such concepts will have to lend its credit from Mercedes' massively successful CLS, the very path they've undertaken is different, these were actually like those Japanese sportscars with four doors, they used to be sports cars, only to be built with four doors, not boring Autobahn cruisers trying to put on a T-Shirt that shouts Nurburgring racers.
So please Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, please don't call your new wonderful creations four door coupes. They're not, and Mazda didn't so with their wonderful RX-8.
Img Source: CromoClassico
