The Mercedes-Benz SLK, BMW Z3, Porsche Boxster and Plymouth Prowler.
The roadster market is growing as automakers rush out with open-top two seaters. And more are coming–the Audi TTS in about a year, the Dodge Copperhead once Chrysler gives the production nod to a high-performance concept roadster built off the Plymouth Prowler platform.
And, of course, with its lift-off top, the Chevrolet Corvette deserves to be listed with the new kids in the market.
Though the future looks bright for roadsters, it certainly was bleak not too many years ago. The auto industry was spending its time and money meeting federal emissions, fuel-economy and, especially, safety regulations that mandated bland machines to meet deadlines.
Give credit to Mazda, which in those dark days brought out a little open-top two-seater called Miata, reminiscent of the old British roadsters. People stood in line to get their hands on a $13,800 Miata.
“Miata arrived at a time when people were lulled into believing that an affordable, fun-to-drive car couldn’t and wouldn’t be built anymore,” said Mercedes-Benz spokesman Jim Koscs, in paying homage to the machine largely responsible for the surge in roadster entries.
Miata, and the market it created, told the industry that despite demands for higher mileage, clean air and safety, folks still wanted fun-to-drive cars.
“Then the Dodge Viper came out in the 1992 model year and that really served as a wakeup call,” Koscs said.
“We had been working on our Boxster concept at the same time Viper was being developed and the reaction to Viper reassured us that the interest was there in roadsters, that what we were doing was right, that we were headed in the right direction and that people were waiting for us to get there with this type of car,” said Porsche spokesman Bob Carlson.
Carlson said Porsche takes some credit for the spate of roadsters among its European rivals.
“In 1993 we showed Boxster as a styling exercise at the Detroit Auto Show, tipping our hand and announcing to the world that we would come out with a car like that. Along with the success of the Miata and Viper, the Boxster concept helped BMW and Mercedes see the opportunity to enter that market, too. So it’s not just coincidence that we are all entering the market at about the same time,” Carlson said.
BMW says it had its eye on roadsters even before the Boxster concept was unveiled.
“We looked at this (roadster) trend in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” said Bert Holland, manager of special projects for BMW.
“We started to see changes in the vehicles in multicar households, those who owned two or three vehicles. In the ’60s and ’70s, people drove a couple of sedans, maybe a sedan and a wagon. Then in the ’80s the multivehicle households added a mini-van for the kids. But then they grew tired of them because they were boring and lacked sex appeal,” he said.
“Then they moved to sport-utility vehicles that could go anywhere and still were secure for the kids and were sporty and cool to drive. But many of the SUVs have become boring, too. There’s no thrill to driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee,” Holland said.
“The fun of driving disappeared in the ’80s. While there had been interest in people doing things for themselves, that suddenly became taboo along about 1987, when it became important to do things for the family,” Holland said.
“We are seeing a backlash, people saying `dammit, I earned it and want to reward myself and give myself a present,’ and that’s a roadster,” Holland says.
At one end of the scale was Miata, a simple machine, and at the other was Viper, a high-performance, limited-edition number for those not faint of heart.
“Lifestyles have changed, and people are urged to have fun and experience excitement again. With the all-new roadsters, they can have fun and yet not have to make any compromises because the new cars meet federal standards,” Holland said.
“One of the charms of the ’50s and ’60s roadsters is that you loved to work on them on your own, which is good because you needed to work on those cars all the time to get them to run,” Porsche’s Carlson said.
“One of the charms is that even with the safety and emission and mileage hardware on these cars, you don’t have to work on them all the time. They’re low-maintenance cars. They no longer are just weekend toys, but nearly all-season machines, which is one reason they will be attractive to females. About 15 percent of the buyers of our 911 are women, but we see 30 percent of our Boxster buyers being women,” Carlson said.
Roadsters provide open-top motoring, and they seat only two. That satisfies consumers’ long-standing demand for convertibles and empty-nesters’ desire to get out of any car associated with the many years they had to haul the kids and their friends.
And unlike some exotic sports cars and sports coupes, the roadsters aren’t so powerful that they intimidate motorists. They look like they perform well without having to boast low zero-to-60-m.p.h. times. And they can be enjoyed cruising and not just making off-the-line bursts.
Roadsters fulfill that Walter Mitty dream in all of us.
No one knows how big the market will be, though all agree it won’t be huge. The betting is that the market will total 100,000 to 125,000 units annually by the end of the decade.
For the most part roadsters are aimed at Baby Boomers whose kids have started to leave home and empty-nesters. They’re for folks who want something more personal parked next to the sedan, mini-van or sport-ute.
“With sport-utes and mini-vans accounting for sales of 1 million units each annually and 45 million to 50 million Boomers, not to mention generation Xers out there who now have found a job, you don’t have to catch too many people moving out of utes or vans–half to 1 percent–to sell a lot of roadsters,” Holland said.
“The largest segment of our population is Baby Boomers, a substantial portion of people who have reached the time in their lives when they’ve become empty-nesters and a group that studies show have inherited $8 trillion from their parents,” said Porsche’s Carlson.
“These people have the money and most of them at one time or another in their lives have owned a sports car. With roadsters all we needed to do was rekindle the excitement they once had with a car,” Carlson said.
For the time being, the Japanese are only bit players.
“The Japanese started out with Nissan Z cars at $3,500 and Mazda RX7s at $8,000 but they kept increasing prices each year so that the $3,500 to $8,000 cars became $40,000 sports cars,” said Mercedes’ Koscs. “As prices went up 30 to 40 percent each year, they lost customers, plus the Japanese offered coupes for the most part and not convertibles. Now the Z car and the RX7 have been discontinued.”
While the new roadsters hover around $40,000 (Boxster, $39,980; Mercedes SLK, $39,700; BMW Z3, $29,425 in 4-cylinder version, $35,900 with a 6-cylinder; Corvette at $38,060 and Prowler an estimated $35,000), they didn’t start life as low-cost sports cars. They are all-new, open-top machines designed for a market segment.
“The Japanese geared up to sell 60,000 sports cars each year,” said Koscs. “Chevy has no problem selling 20,000 Corvettes each year, but Nissan couldn’t sell 60,000 Zs. There’s a market for roadsters but it’s not 50,000 to 60,000 by each automaker every year. These are low-volume cars in which demand outstrips supply,” he said, adding “I’m sure the Japanese are taking another look at this market.”
The roadsters are on display at the Chicago Auto Show from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily through Sunday in McCormick Place South.
