There’s a common misconception that convertibles were once banned in the United States, but that’s far from the truth. Here’s what actually happened.
The 1970s marked one of the most significant transitory periods in American automotive history. Whether it’s as mundane as the changeover from gross horsepower rating to SAE Net horsepower in 1972, to the 1973 and 1979 Oil Crises massively inflating gas prices nationwide, the entire industry changed dramatically within the span of less than a decade. Among all those changes, however, came new safety regulations mandating rollover protections, which ended the classic convertible – or so the thinking goes. While it’s true that the government proposed new rollover protection standards in 1971, the decline of the convertible began several years before that in the 1960s, largely due to customer demand more than anything.
That comes with several reasons and caveats of its own — namely, we’re talking about the 1960s here. These aren’t modern cars with modern weather stripping and climate control. Even cars like the original MX-5 are well-known to have leaky roofs, much less something from 60 years ago. Plus, climate control was either nonexistent or in a primitive format. A convertible top, by contrast, was a perfectly viable means of avoiding being boiled inside a black leather cabin in the summer.
