Two seats, and no structure above them that was ever meant to stay. A roadster is planned open from the first sketch, and the consequences run through the whole car: deep sills to replace the stiffness a roof would have provided, a low screen, a short deck behind the cabin, and a weight distribution set without a rear bench to consider. Compare that with a convertible derived from a closed car, where the engineering effort goes into recovering what the roof used to do.
The shape survives in small numbers at both ends of the market, from mass-produced two-seaters to work like Bugatti’s W16 Mistral, which took the marque’s quad-turbo engine into an open body for the last time. Practicality is not the point and the compromises are not hidden: one row of seats, boot space measured against a folded roof, and cabin noise that rises with speed whatever the top is made of.
