Body of the car

What is a car body? "A box made of wood, metal or plastic, in which cargo and passengers are carried," the driver will answer. "The most expensive and heavy element of the car," - adds the designer. "All other details are attached to it", - the engineer will specify. And the designer will say: "The body is a work of art!". Interestingly, each of them will be right in his own way.

Wealth of forms

At the Union it was not accepted to design a body of the car, different from a sedan (Moskvich, Volga, Zhiguli) and the versatile person (Vaz 2104, Volga 24-13). On the roads of the country, mostly only such cars ran. The monotonous flow of twin machines was occasionally diluted by limousines of the government car park, foreign coupe, roadsters and cabriolets. But the appearance of these machines was so rare that it was always perceived as an event, gathering around the onlookers.

But those days have sunk into oblivion, and today, watching the busy highway, you can grab a couple of minutes of such types of car bodies as fastback, hatchback, notchback, one-, two-, and even three-compartment cars, medium-hood cars. And also amazing crosses coupes with station wagons, convertibles with pickups and jeeps with limousines. There are options where it does not even figure out which car body is used in this case. After all, now every automaker considers it their duty to release not one or two models on the same "platform" as before, but three, five or even more different models, and it is very difficult for even the creators to understand their classification.

Types of bodies

The cabriolet is a passenger car body with a soft top and sinking side windows. In international documents, cabriolets are only those cars whose side windows are removed rather than lowered.

Hoodless is a one-volume body, whose front axle is located behind the center point of the steering wheel. A large number of small Japanese cars, at first glance, with a "wagon" layout, in fact are bespokotnikami. A bright representative of this type is Subaru Sambar.

A phaeton is a passenger-type body with a soft awning instead of a roof and removable windows. The confusion is added by the fact that in Germany a chaise was called a cabriolet with a six-seater body, a folding roof and the possibility of removing the side window racks.

A van is considered to be a body of a car, in which the cargo is separated from the driver by a partition. This type with small changes in the form of removable seats in the cargo compartment and without a partition between the driver's and cargo volumes began to be popular since the 90s of last century.

Combi is a two-piece body in which it is possible to carry both passengers and relatively large loads (with the rear seats folded). The rear door combi facilitates loading and unloading. As you can guess from the title, in this type of body, the designers combined the capabilities of the sedan and station wagon. Despite the fact that IZH-Kombi was produced for many years, the foreign word "hatchback" became more popular than the Soviet name, which, unfortunately, did not take root.

Universal - body, which has two volumes, passenger and cargo, between which there are no partitions. The rear rows of seats universal fold.

Some cars of this type, for example, Reno Espace, can be called single-volume station wagons. So the station wagon is not necessarily bicomponent.

Roadster - quite a rare type of double-body, with a soft roof.

Targa - usually a coupe or sedan with the ability to remove the middle part of the hard top. A bright representative of this type - Porsche 911 Targa and Porsche 914.

The pickup is a cargo-passenger type body for one or two rows of seats, with a rigid partition separating cargo from passengers, in the back of which there is an open platform for cargo.