page_title: Coupé de Ville
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Coupé de Ville / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Hispano-Suiza H6B Jacques Saoutchik Landaulette, 1925
context_page_description: Coupé de ville — also known as town car or sedanca de ville — is a car body style produced from 1908 to 1939 with an external or open-topped driver's position and an enclosed compartment for passengers. Although the different terms may have once had specific meanings for certain car manufacturers or countries, the terms are often used interchangeably.
  Some coupés de ville have the passengers separated from the driver in a fully enclosed compartment while others have a canopy for the passengers and no partition between the driver and the passengers.
context_section_description: Early cars had the driver fully exposed to the weather with no cover, no doors, and sometimes no windshield,. As speed and distances travelled increased, windshields were added to protect the driver from dirt from the unpaved roads and dung from draught animals. Later models also included doors to the driving compartment.
  Early roofs for the driver's area were made of a single skin of leather without any structural support, and were held in place between the passenger compartment and the windshield by poppers to allow for easy removal or rollback when the weather allowed. From the late 1920s onward designs used a metal two-skin roof which retracted into a void above the passenger compartment, either manually or electrically.
  Due to its use as a chauffeured vehicle, the passenger compartment was normally luxurious, clad in the best materials, with seating for between two and most often up to six or occasionally eight persons, made of the finest cotton or silk adorned with brocade. The same material was also most often used to provide complete curtain coverage for the compartment, and was matched by substantial carpet and fine inlaid woodwork. The driver's compartment had leather seats to endure bad weather. The division between the two compartments often held jump seats for lighter passengers such as children, and it would often accommodate various compartments for drinks, cigars, make-up, or books.
  Some versions had a partition between the driver and the passengers. These partitions often had a small slide-back glass window, or were completely made of glass with a manual or electric winding system. The passengers could speak to the driver through a communications tube, or, from the 1920s, through an electrical device similar to a telephone. Some designs included a switch panel in the rear passenger compartment, which contained a speedometer and switches to impart the most common instructions to the driver via a lighted dashboard panel, such as  "stop", "left", "right", or "home".
caption: 1925 Hispano-Suiza Type H.6 with collapsible rear compartment roof, also called a Landaulet
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