My best moments have been in convertibles but sales are plummeting & there’s a reason why

IN more than 25 years as a motoring journalist, I have tested all sorts of vehicles – from supercars to SUVs. 

I have been in all sorts of countries and on all sorts of circuits and roads. And it occurs to me that all the best moments have been spent in convertibles. 

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Why is that? Well, it’s nothing to do with performance or handling, given drop-tops come in all shapes and sizes. 

No, it’s because driving with the roof down is the ultimate celebration of life – with the wind in your hair, the weather in your face, belting out songs at the top of your voice without a care in the world, your senses overwhelmed by the noises and sounds. 

It’s raw, it’s immersive. It’s what driving is meant to be about. 

There was the time I found myself crawling up a closed ski slope in Chamonix, France, at the launch of one of the world’s few convertible SUVs, the Land Rover Evoque (there’s also the Jeep Wrangler whose roof comes off, or the Volkswagen T-Roc Cabrio, if you fancy the idea). 

It was a very strange and massively fun experience, surrounded by the high, chunky sides of this 4×4, tyres crunching through the snow, but with blue sky above me and the warm sun on my face. 

Shame no one else loved it as much as me and it disappeared from sale. 

Thing of beauty 

Then there was the drive through London one August evening in a Bentley Continental GTC (it’s a tough job), with its smart tweed roof furled behind the embossed headrests, V8 engine purring quietly in the twilight heat, mellow sounds on the radio, the city smells of restaurants, perfume, cigar smoke and life drifting gently through the yellow pools of street light. 

And of course, right back in a world before children, when disposable income was a thing, and responsibility was not, my boyfriend and I had a two-seater Mazda MX-5 in London. 

It is the world’s best-selling convertible, which we used and abused, as you do in your twenties, unclipping the vinyl roof on the move, throwing it back to land where it pleased behind our seats, before hurtling out into the countryside for yet another mini-break. Sigh. 

Recently, I had the pleasure of six months with one of the UK’s two current electric convertible models on sale, the Abarth 500e (a hot version of the Fiat 500e). 

Electric convertibles aren’t yet a thing because everyone has been concentrating on keeping the weight and price down and efficiency up for electric cars, to extend their range as much as possible, which means no drop-top. 

However, I hope we start to see more on sale as efficiency and cost improve, because driving along in silence with that little roof folded back was a thing of beauty. 

It sounds cheesy, but you really do feel at one with nature, breathing in air that you haven’t polluted with tailpipe emissions

It sounds cheesy, but you really do feel at one with nature, breathing in air that you haven’t polluted with tailpipe emissions, listening to the birds calling in the sky above you, the blue stretching on forever. 

It beats an air-conditioned box any day. 

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