I remember reading a thread about the problems of placing a hardtop on to the Z roadster, and the main problem was the mounting point. Anyway, the other day i was looking at some corvettes and notice that the way their hardtop is mounted, is with the tonneau cover removed, couldn't we do this also? Just take off the tonneau cover for our roadster and we would have more than enough space to create a hard top mount! Perfect for the winter seasons.

The hardtop can make the car look more like a coupe, instead of a hatchback like the regular coupe.

A demonstration with MS paint.



However, i would assume there won't be much demand for this... since we already have a coupe counter part.

 

I think if there was a hardtop for the roadster...a lot of us coupe guys would had gotten one instead.

 

A hardtop like the SLK or SC would have made me buy one.

 

Why would having a hardtop make a coupe person buy a roadster instead? The arguments for a coupe over a roadster is more room and less weight, a hardtop would not increase space and would actually make the roadster heavier.

I for one would never buy a hardtop for my Roadster....

 

Me neither.

 

These are a couple Chops I did back in 2003 before the real ZR came out - I was pretty close with the ZR, eh?

The hard part about styling a hardtop is making the lines look good... I would have to work on this one a bit longer to get it right but it would look nice as a HTC.



~KK

 

Nice job on the chops, however I think that the hardtop on the chops make the car look too much like the Audi TT.

 

omg.. you ruined a perfect car... task task

 

I live in Alabama and we have convertible weather about 10 months of the year. I own a 2004 Roadster and my wife has a 2002 Thunderbird Convertible with the removable hard top. The hard top does make the car look totally different but it is a beast to remove and store. Therefore, we have not even put in on the car in over a year because we don't want to miss a single day of top down weather. Removable hard tops are cool but very expensive and they are a huge pain to store. I know this thread was about retractable hard tops but I thought I would add a little about the removable ones.

 

Nissan had a hard top convertible planned and made one --too costly and would have put it over 45000.00 so Nissan scrapped it.

But who knows, it could be done, I think the trunk would have to lose more space.