| masraum |
03-18-2020 09:17 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by wdfifteen
(Post 10788922)
My thoughts exactly. It looks OK. Looks like a hatchback to me. A shooting brake is a woody station wagon rotting away in England, isn't it?
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This is an interesting differentiation from someone on Reddit for estate/wagon, shootingbrake and hatchback.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/9akm5b/whats_the_difference_between_a_hatchback_a/
Quote:
A hatchback is a vehicle where instead of having a trunk, the interior continues behind the rear seats as more cargo space, and the entire rear opens up as a hatch. If the angle of the hatch is quite low (30° or less), it may be referred to as a liftback, but the function is pretty much the same. The hatchback config was first introduced (IIRC) on the Renault 16, and soon spread to many other economy and family cars in the EU market. The 1971 Vega was the first US hatchback, but the config didn't become widespread until the VW Rabbit (our name for the Mk1 Golf) was introduced. Hatchbacks can come in 3- or 5-door variants (the rear hatch is counted as a door for some reason), though 3-doors are not as popular now as they were in the '80s.
A wagon (or sometimes estate in the EU) extends the greenhouse of a sedan farther back, over the rear wheels and trunk area to form more cargo and/or passenger space. Before the advent of minivans in the mid-'80s, large station wagons were the most common family haulers in the US. Modern wagons are purely 4-doors, but until the late '60s for American cars and late '70s for some Japanese compacts, there were also 2-door wagons that used the longer doors of the coupe or 2-door sedan models (yes, there is a difference between a coupe and a 2-door sedan).
Modern wagons tend to be quite sloped in the rear, but the easiest way to distinguish a sloped wagon from a hatchback is by how long it is. A wagon will be about the same length as the sedan version or slightly longer; a hatchback will never be longer than the sedan and is usually shorter.
Shooting-brake refers to a 2-door sports car that has had its greenhouse extended like a wagon so it can have more luggage room, but passenger space is still the same (either a 2-seater or a 2+2). It's important to note that a shooting-brake is not quite the same as a 2-door wagon or 3-door hatch. The shooting-brake always started out as a 2-door sports car, but a hatchback need not have started out as a coupe. The emphasis of a shooting-brake is also on performance, rather than space efficiency like a hatch or wagon. Whether it's possible to make a 4-door shooting brake or if such a vehicle would automatically turn into a "4-door sports wagon" is a debate I won't take a position on.
Fastback is a regular sedan or coupe that has a long, sloping roofline and a short trunklid--but not any kind of hatch. On most modern fastbackss, the rear window is sloped with the roof, but on many fastbacks of the '60s, the sloped look was achieved only by the side "sail panels" so that the trunklid could still be decently sized.
The fastback is contrasted with notchback, which is more upright and has a longer trunklid. Fastback rooflines were popular in the late '60s and early '70s on many American cars, but the more formal and spacious notchback came back with a vengeance in the late '70s and into much of the '80s for many American cars. The '90s aerodynamic trend moved cars back to a bulbous, curvy fastback look, and now with so much emphasis on MPG, most sedans have such a sloped fastback roof that it impedes on their rear headroom, and makes it harder to access the trunk through such a tiny mail slot of a lid. We probably won't see a return to spacious notchback sedans now with the popularity of CUVs.
"Sportback" is largely a marketing term. Audi uses it to refer to their wagons, and Mitsubishi used it at one time to refer to the hatchback version of the Lancer. Why invent a new term? Because in the US, "wagon" conjures images of your grandpa's bloated Buick Roadmaster with wood vinyl siding, and "hatchback" brings to mind dowdy econoboxes from the '80s.
Another term which might be helpful to know is Kammback. It's not a specific config, but rather a styling feature. It's when the rear of the car has a sloping fastback or hatchback, but it ends very abruptly like it was cut off. The feature helps minimize drag, which is why it's commonly seen on hybrid cars.
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