Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Wen | Aohu

Twenty years ago, a concept car named Vision CLS stunned Frankfurt, and Mercedes-Benz suddenly enlightened the world: it turns out that coup é can also have four doors; it turns out that there is such an elegant and gorgeous way to open a four-door car.

Twenty years later, with rumors that Mercedes-Benz was considering cutting back on its product line, and the name CLS ranks among "niche models that may be discontinued", we suddenly realized that the four-door coupe, once an absolute flower, had been out of date for a long time.

The transformation of new energy overlaps the economic outlook, and traditional car companies are scaling back their fuel product lines. It has long been rumored that Mercedes-Benz is going to operate on its own huge series of models, such as the downsizing of the entry series. Recently, there are foreign media news, two-door coupe / convertible, station wagon and even CLS and AMG GT four-door version, may not have a car.

Seeing the name CLS, which once made a large number of fans dream of, I can't help but think: how time flies. In just a few years, the category of four-door coupe is no longer the focus of public attention.

This fade-out is not absolutely reflected in sales, because although the meaning of the four-door coup é is to expand the applicable population of coup é, in the final analysis, it is still a more niche body type compared to the mainstream (cars, SUV). As a result, their mission also has a greater component, is to enrich and sublimate the brand tonality.

Today, the mission of the four coup é has been almost completed.

In addition to CLS, another four-door coup é that Chinese people are very familiar with is Volkswagen CC--, which was once known as the "most beautiful public". At a more realistic price, Volkswagen offers equally beautiful sedan lines and frameless doors. Until the late 2010s, CC was spoiled as the most popular four-door sedan.

But in the late 2010s, it is difficult to find an exact time point, these once star models of the Automobile Forum, unwittingly lost their once super popularity. They are still favored by some die-hard fans, but their charm is far less well known than in the early years.

The last time CC received wide attention was before and after it was renamed Arteon overseas in 2017; CLS was replaced by the "triangular Eye" design language in 2018, and its image within the brand gradually looked like one of the conventional cars; since BMW changed from 6-Series to 8-Series, it can no longer cause any big waves (but in this case, there is an individual factor of positioning change).

As a relatively minority tonality model, what is more telling is the price and premium space. The CLS and the A7 were once a "small million" in the 2010s, priced much higher than their four-door, hatchback cousins, the E and the A6. Today, the reference prices of these two four-door sedans, which continue to this day, have been less than 600000 yuan (BMW 6-Series / 8-Series is special).

The popularity and influence of four-door coup é is far less than it used to be, largely because of its own success.

Before Mercedes-Benz released the Vision CLS concept car (production car rehearsal) in 2003, the hatchback must take care of the rear headspace. Although the car space at that time was not comparable to that of today, it was subjectively as rich as possible for the back row and the top of the head. That is to avoid the excessive inclination of the C-pillar / rear windshield and form a typical hatchback feature.

For the first time, the emergence of the CLS, under the condition that the whole car size is fully permissible (based on the E-class platform), consciously sacrificed the back row, especially the head space, only to create a smoother side line close to the two-door coup é.

If you change the four doors of the original CLS into two doors, there is little need to make any changes to the outline of the roof and side windows-it is a four-door coup é, which is different from the large two-door coup é, just two more rear doors.

The boldness and originality of this concept may not be so easy to understand today, because most of the new hatchback cars launched in recent years have more or less absorbed the design of a four-door sedan. On the contrary, the serious "hatchback" shape seems to be extinct.

It is precisely when the four-door sedan and the hatchback car are deeply intertwined and integrated, and when the hatchback car is generally "car-running" and "slippery", the boundary between the two is becoming more and more blurred, and the "professional" four-door coup é naturally loses its meaning of independent existence, and the image originally rooted in the hearts of car fans with its unique aesthetic feeling is certainly no longer so profound.

The first generation of Jaguar XF and the Buick Regal in 2009 are earlier attempts, and ten generations of Accord have integrated the slip-away design into maturity. Fuel trucks are increasingly extending the rear windshield back, which is still different from the "professional" four-door coup é, but ordinary people who are less nuanced seem to be very close.

As the year approached the 2020s, the rise of electrification and newly built cars further made the hatchback sedan more collective sedan. On the one hand, due to structural reasons, electric vehicles tend to move the rear windshield back to form a short rear like a four-door coup é due to structural reasons; on the other hand, the car roof is conducive to shaping a cutting-edge image.

Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng P7, Zero run, Nezha. Almost all the new and old forces you want, the new hatchback cars launched in the past two years, have more or less joined the sedan design with varying degrees of performance, and some even call themselves four-door coupe directly.

At first glance, less naked sedan models are already more sporty than similar hatchback sedans many years ago. The Lucid Air does not have a typical back-slip feature, but the curved rear windshield still creates a visual effect that is not inferior to that of a coupe. The bow body of the Mercedes-Benz EQS / EQE is the same.

It is precisely because of the trial and error of the four-door coupe in front over the past 20 years, constantly looking for a balance point and way between the streamline roof lines and the rear head space, so that the appearance design of the hatchback sedan has completely freed itself from the traditional styling. It can be said that it was the four-door sedan that "killed" the four-door sedan.

Electrification and the emergence of new forces have accelerated and compacted this result. Today, it is not only the car that has become a sedan, but also the task of innovating the proportion of cars, which is no longer the direction of "sedan cars". Naturally, it does not fall on the four-door coupe.

For a long time, not all four-door coups have lost the meaning to continue to exist independently. Porsche Panamera has become the image embodiment of "wealth" to some extent. Audi A7 and high-performance RS7 still maintain a lot of heat.

The root cause of the discrepancy between different individuals is that whether it is the "four-door sedan" as an independent model, or the sedan car of today's new power and new model, the car-running treatment of the roof lines is actually divided into a variety of different subdivision paths.

CLS, Volkswagen CC / Arteon and BMW 6-Series GranCoupe all belong to the relatively balanced front and rear doors and non-hatchback rear doors. Their roof lines go down earlier and make more serious sacrifices for rear space, so when the hatchback is generally sporty and sedan-like, the appearance of these models is greatly reduced.

Electric models such as the Panamera, the 10th-generation Accord and even today's Xilai ET7 generally have very short tails, which in fact move the windshield back substantially. Therefore, although the profile is not as light and compact as the previous one, it ensures the space in the back row to a greater extent and is the most mainstream way to deal with it today.

The A7's Fastback suffix reflects the identity of the hatchback, the practical bonus brought by the hatchback rear door, and the more recognizable roof of the fastback, which gives the hatchback a unique feature that is more difficult to reach, making it easier to maintain its status and diversity in the current era of sedan.

After entering the electric era, the general car running of the hatchback car has the technical reason that the battery raises the car body and has to increase the redundancy of the rear head and reduce the wind resistance coefficient, but the aesthetic fatigue and poor recognition brought about by sameness will eventually affect the follow-up choices of car companies.

In particular, the sedan running of electric vehicles, due to the physical structure, often brings costs such as bloated rear section of the car body, small blind area of the rear window and large blind area. The body form liberation brought about by electrification may be further developed in the future, such as the success of polar krypton 001 hunting car, Gaohe and Avita have been difficult to accurately classify.

When BMW released the i Vision Dee concept car at the beginning of the year, we saw the classic hatchback body for a long time, and the i Vision Dee is regarded as a production rehearsal for the next generation of BMW's pure electric platform New Klass. It can be seen that there are structural reasons for the use of palanquin roof in electric vehicles, but it is not the only solution that can not be bypassed.

Today's rampant sedan design is only the retaliatory result of liberating from the classical proportion: from one stereotype to another. But electrification fundamentally promotes the freedom of body proportion, and letting a hundred flowers blossom and breaking through imagination should be what the future will look like.

Even if the world will not continue to be occupied by sedan cars in the future, don't forget that it was the emergence of four-door coup é 20 years ago that started the process of sedan cars breaking the inherent proportion and seeking body liberation.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: autocarweekly (ID:autocarweekly)

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