Here are 45 of the greatest ever convertibles

If your primary goal with a convertible is to be seen, then this is the car for you. If your primary goal with a convertible is to have insults hurled at you the second you stray from the confines of Mayfair, this may also be the car for you. Either way, not much else besides the Phantom DHC allows you to experience drop-top motoring in quite such opulent surroundings.

Lexus’s first two cracks at convertibles, the SC430 and IS Convertible, were, to put it as politely as possible, a bit rubbish. Thankfully, third time was indeed the charm when it lopped the roof off the utterly lovely V8-powered LC500 cruiser to create the even lovelier convertible model. It was a wilfully odd, idiosyncratic choice, but one that got so deep under our skin it was close to burrowing right into our bones.

Take your pick of which one, although we’d be hard pressed to pass up the original Graduate-spec ‘boat tail’ Duetto. So perfectly formed were this little roadster’s rounded looks and raspy twin-cam engine that Alfa didn’t bother replacing its platform or its overall shape for the best part of 30 years. Yes, that was definitely the reason, and not because Alfa didn’t have any money.

Unfortunately, the Lincoln Continental's fate is forever entwined with the most famous assassination in political history. If you’re not a head of state, though, you’re much better positioned to enjoy not only a paragon of tasteful early ’60s American car design, but a rare example of a four-door drop top (with coach doors, no less), which we’re sure had no impact on structural rigidity whatsoever.

Why aren’t more cars named after coffees? Okay, maybe not a flat white, but a cappuccino is a perfect metaphor for this small, frothy and zingy little number. Built to Japan’s kei car regulations, the Cappuccino (the car, not the drink) may have only packed 63bhp, but it made the best of it with a titchy 725kg kerbweight, a near-50/50 weight distribution and an optional limited-slip diff. Also optional was a dusting of chocolate on the roof.

It slightly hurts our brains that a barely decade-old supercar is already starting to command over £1 million on the collector market, but if any is worthy, it’s the 458 Speciale Aperta. For one thing, only 499 were built, and for another, it’s one of perhaps the two or three greatest Ferraris ever built, with the added bonus of direct exposure to the razor-sharp wail of that era-closing 4.5-litre V8.

Arguably even more raw and elemental than that Ferrari is the Porsche 718 Spyder RS, a car whose 9,000rpm-capable 4.0-litre flat-six gulps in air a few centimetres behind your ear, so that it feels as if you’re actually going to be sucked directly into the engine and become part of the machine. You’ll literally never want to stop driving it, which is slightly annoying, because you’ll have to in order to deal with that fiddly roof.

It’s a Mini, but convertible. Genius, right? Although lots of aftermarket convertible versions of the original Mini existed, it took until 1993 for Rover to bother offering one itself. Not so with the modern BMW version, which has come in convertible form since 2004 and has long landed at a pleasing spot on the fun-to-value graph. Today, it’s one of the few sub-£30k convertibles left. Sad face.

We’re talking, of course, about the original, not the front-wheel drive Isuzu-powered ’90s revival – although that in itself is a rather underrated little car. The first Elan, though, is the two-seater roadster in its purest, most essential form: in its design, its engineering and its innovative steel backbone chassis, there’s not a single extraneous element, and the result is a masterpiece of minimalism that served as a template for so many others.

If you picture a muscle car, you probably don’t picture it with a convertible roof, but there’s no real reason you shouldn’t. After all, the original Pontiac GTO, the car most would agree invented the muscle car, came right out of the gates with a convertible option. Yeah, it may have been less rigid than the coupe, but if millimetric gains in torsional stiffness are what you’re after in a ’60s muscle car, you may need to re-evaluate your priorities.

With all its previous efforts more akin to targa tops, the Gallardo Spyder was arguably the first ‘proper’ convertible Lamborghini ever made in serious numbers. It nailed it first time, though: a drop-top roof only added to the drama of what was already one of the most theatrical ‘baby’ supercars of its day, especially when that 5.0-litre V10 was screaming away behind your head.

The long-time affordable sports car of choice for snap oversteer enthusiasts, Toyota’s Midship Runabout 2-seater spent over 20 years and three generations offering attainable open-air driving with the added boon of an exotic-feeling mid-engined layout. Hopefully, it’ll continue to do so again quite soon if all those swirling rumours of the MR2’s return prove to be true.

McLaren has done convertible versions of basically all of its modern cars save for the GT/GTS and the super-limited Ultimate Series stuff, so why have we singled out the 600LT Spider in particular? Partly because it remains one of the most enticing driving machines to have come out of Woking, but mainly because it has vertically-mounted exhausts that shoot out blue flames. We’re nothing if not easily impressed.

There isn’t a single piece of gushing praise about the Mazda MX-5 that hasn’t been committed to print or screen by now, so we’ll keep it brief: inspired by classic British roadsters, revitalised the sports car market, best-selling sports car of all time, class- and age-spanning appeal, last of its kind, yada yada. Look, it’s the MX-5. We know it’s brilliant. You know it’s brilliant. Everyone does.

If ever there was a clearer indicator of the differences between crossovers and proper old-school 4x4s, you need only look at what happens when you convertible-ise them. With the former, you end up with disaster-classes like the VW T-Roc Cabriolet, but nobody in human history has ever looked at a classic soft-top Defender and gone ‘nah, I hate it’. Even if the canvas is saggy. Which it almost definitely is.

That frigid, snowy Sweden should have produced such a legendary cabriolet seems strange at first glance, but when you look at the way the people of Scandinavia embrace summer, it makes perfect sense (well, that and the fact it was mainly built to appeal to the US market). Thankfully, the 900 Cab’s timeless, wedgy Scandi appeal extends far beyond its homeland, especially in 160bhp turbocharged form.

The 207mph the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster will attain with the roof up still makes it one of the fastest convertibles of all time. Heck, it’s still the fastest to have an old-school fabric roof rather than a solid retractable or detachable one. It also remains a drop-top capable of munching up enormous miles like very few others. Not bad for a car that’s nearly 20 years old, on a platform approaching its quarter-century.

The USA has always been a major motivator for companies launching convertibles, and it was with that lucrative market in mind that BMW set about developing the stunning 507 in the 1950s. You might know the rest: this V8-powered roadster was an expensive failure that contributed to BMW’s flirtation with bankruptcy in the latter part of that decade, and yet if one comes up for sale today, it can easily fetch north of £2 million. Funny how things work out.

It’s no exaggeration to say that VW’s takeover and the development of the Continental GT completely turned Bentley’s fortunes around, and the arrival of the soft-top GTC was no doubt part of that. It helps that there’s now very little penalty for buying the convertible: Bentley says with the roof up, its cabin is as quiet as the coupe’s was a decade ago. You’re sort of doing it wrong if you’re driving with the roof up, though.

The fact that the Honda S2000 is a convertible is probably secondary to its centrepiece, that furious four-cylinder engine that barks its way to 9,000rpm while making about as much torque as a three-year-old’s handshake. Still, the folding roof is pretty integral to the S2000 experience, and just adds another dimension to the enjoyment of that engine, even if it’ll mostly be drowned out by the wind when you’re going fast enough to actually hear the VTEC kick in, yo.

Even though the Supersport has been designed to be the most modern, usable car Morgan’s ever made, the company’s also worked hard to ensure it hasn’t lost any of the olde worlde charm that makes a Morgan a Morgan. That extends to its fabric roof, the erection of which is rather more than the work of a moment. Best be sure if you’re off on a top-down jolly that you’re absolutely certain it’s not going to rain, otherwise swearing will ensue.

Few would argue that the designs coming out of America in the 1950s didn’t represent a high point of car styling: extravagant and bold yet somehow rarely tipping over into kitsch and vulgarity. Nowhere is that better summed up than in the Chevy Bel Air in its instantly recognisable 1957 form, and while it looks fantastic as a hardtop, the convertible might be even better.

If that Chevy encompassed lavish ’50s design tropes at their best, then the Peugeot 504 Cabriolet sums up the eye for restraint and lack of embellishment that had taken over by the end of the following decade. There’s not an extraneous crease or curve to be found on this Pininfarina-penned masterpiece, which is partly why it would look as at home cruising the Promenade des Anglais today as it must have done in 1969.

The F-Type marked Jaguar’s return to proper sports cars after many decades away, especially in convertible form. It was imbued with perfect two-seater roadster proportions, came with a range of ridiculously snarly, snorty engines (as long as you forget about the four-cylinder version, which we’re sure you already have) and, in the truest roadster tradition, was hopelessly impractical – not that the last bit mattered one bit once you drove it.

In its hardtop Competizione form, the Alfa Romeo 8C was as disappointing to drive as it was stunning to look at. None of that mattered with the Spider, though, partly because it was arguably somehow even prettier, partly because Alfa tweaked the suspension to make it more of a laid-back GT, but mainly because dynamics don’t matter when you’ve got the top down and one of the all-time great engines barking away in front of you.

‘But which version?’, you might be asking, and it’s a fair question: the Thunderbird was made for 11 generations, morphing from a gorgeous two-seater roadster to a big overwrought luxury barge to a surprisingly sporty coupe to a fairly hateful retro pastiche of itself. For us, though, it has to be the last one. Only kidding – the best T-bird is clearly the first, another elegant high point of ’50s US car design.

Do you enjoy your convertibles with a side order of raw, unbridled terror? Do we have the car for you! Weighing about as much as a box of tissues and powered by a succession of snarling Rover V8s, the Chimaera, in true TVR sticking-it-to-the-establishment fashion remained untroubled by such trivialities as traction control and ABS, right up to 2003 when production finally ended. Gosh, we miss cars like this.

Supposedly, when Princess Diana was regularly spotted cutting about the swankier parts of west London in a green Audi Cabriolet in the ’90s, the fact that she wasn’t in a British car caused a bit of good old fashioned righteous indignation in the tabloids. Can you blame her, though? What was the closest British equivalent to this five-cylinder slab of teutonic excellence? A Rover 200 Cabriolet? Exactly.

The Pagani Utopia coupe is one of a highly exclusive club of cars to come out of the rigours of a Top Gear review scoring a perfect 10. We haven’t driven the Roadster yet, but somehow we doubt that cutting the roof off what’s already one of the most theatrical supercars around is going to detract from the experience, especially with a twin-turbo V12 right behind your head. We’d be happy to verify this, though. Please, Pagani?

We’ve mentioned the ornate but rarely vulgar nature of ’50s American car design a couple of times so far, which inevitably leads us to this, the moment at which it was pushed to its extreme. Any attempts to outdo the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, with its tailfins that looked like two bisected halves of a deltawing aircraft, simply would have been going too far. This is ’50s Americana at its ridiculous peak.

Although it would soon become available as a coupe, and in fact the final generation would be hardtop-only, the Dodge Viper was originally conceived as a latter-day take on the AC Cobra, so we’d argue that the roadster is its truest form. Certainly, it’s the best way of experiencing its leviathan of an 8.0-litre V10, as well as drowning out the concerns of your passenger when they discover there’s no traction control.

Speaking of the AC Cobra, no list of great convertibles can be complete without it, even if its soft-top roof was a saggy afterthought designed as a last resort for weather protection. Pretty much any brawny, stripped-back big-motor roadster that came since, though, from myriad TVRs to the aforementioned Viper, can trace its roots back to this legendary piece of transatlantic sports car engineering.

For a car so nerdishly obsessed with aerodynamics and downforce as the Aston Martin Valkyrie to subsequently lose its roof does seem to miss the point a little, but when have rational considerations like that ever mattered in the arena of seven-figure hypercars? Especially when right behind your head is a wailing 6.5-litre, 11,100rpm Cosworth-built V10. Y’know, just in case being in the coupe wasn’t noisy enough.

Is this where we roll out that one Enzo Ferrari quote? Cliched as it is, though, il Commendatore may have had a point: take a look at an E-Type Jag in side profile, especially in roadster form where its bullet-like form and those subtly swollen rear haunches are all the more pronounced, and it’s hard to argue that a more gorgeous car has ever existed. As long as it’s not a Series 3.

This could be a contender, though, not that Enzo would have been in the habit of praising his company’s big rival from up the road in Modena. The Touring-bodied 3500 GT was good, but it took Vignale lopping the roof off and giving it those more pronounced haunches to transform it into what might be the most beautiful Maserati ever – not bad for the company that also made the A6GCS (but also, to be fair, the Biturbo).

Of course, given what Enzo supposedly said about the E-Type on its 1961 reveal, we have to wonder if he’d been paying attention to what his own company had been up to for the last few years (probably not, given his famous apathy towards road cars), because surely, the Scaglietti-bodied Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder is in with a shot of being the most beautiful car ever? Argue away in the comments.

There are Porsche purists unhappy about the fact the company is now selling a GT3-badged car with a folding roof. This really makes us question how miserable and embittered parts of the enthusiast community have become when they’re bemoaning the arrival of a brand new convertible sports car with a manual gearbox and a naturally aspirated, 9,000rpm flat-six in the year 2026. Come on, lighten up a little.

Before the MX-5, the little MGB was the benchmark for successful sports cars. Over half a million were made over its lifetime, nearly 400,000 of which were the soft-top roadster. The fact that it remained popular for most of its 18-year lifespan was testament to its appeal, and also probably a relief for a perma-cash-strapped British Leyland since there was no real need to develop a replacement.

The original Mustang was an instant success beyond any metric Ford could have predicted, no doubt spurred on by a convertible version debuting alongside the hardtop. After all, if you lived in one of the many sunkissed parts of the US, why would you not want the opportunity to throw the roof back? A convertible’s been part of the lineup ever since, with the exception of the Mustang II. Probably for the best.

Bested only by the Hennessey Venom GT Spyder, the 254mph Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport remains the second-fastest convertible ever. If you had the proper glass roof panel in place, anyway. If you left it at home, got caught in a rainstorm and had to deploy the emergency umbrella-style fabric roof, the fastest you could go in your 987bhp, quad-turbo 16-cylinder hypercar was… 81mph. Still, quick enough unless you’re on the Autobahn.

History has shown that attempts to turn regular family hatchbacks into convertibles have been a mixed bag, to say the least. The VW Golf Cabriolet, though, managed to get it right three times over. In fact, it nailed the whole convertible thing so well that all three iterations stayed in production for some time after their hatchback counterparts had been replaced… only for the entire lineage to be succeeded by the T-Roc Cabriolet. Sigh.

The W113 Mercedes SL, as it’s known to chassis code nerds (hi), is much better known as the ‘Pagoda’ SL, because its slightly indented optional hardtop resembles the canopies on the eponymous religious structures. If you really, really squint. Don’t do that, though, because then you won’t be able to appreciate the timeless, monolithic beauty of this Paul Bracq-penned masterpiece.

Aston Martin has knocked out some staggeringly gorgeous drop-tops over the years under the Volante badge (which is the French for ‘floating’ and, weirdly, the Italian for ‘steering wheel’), so which to choose? We can’t help feel that over 20 years on from its introduction, none of them have quite matched the beauty of the early, pre-facelift DB9 Volante, still perhaps the ultimate 21st century drop-top continent crosser.

It shouldn’t have been possible for the Citroen DS to become more mind-bendingly beautiful and glamourous than it was to begin with, but somehow, Citroen, together with coachbuilder Henri Chapron, managed just that with the almost impossibly gorgeous convertible version. Even the name, Décapotable (which is literally just French for ‘convertible’), rolls off the tongue better than any English equivalent could.

We all know that one of the joys of convertible driving is being able to whizz about with the wind in your hair, but what about having the wind battering basically your entire body too? This was enabled by the funky BMW Z1 with its needlessly complicated retractable doors. They were clearly its standout feature, but the rest of it – two seats, rear-wheel drive, manual gearbox, silky 2.5-litre straight-six – is simply a recipe for a lovely sports car.