Re: Origin of term "Spider"

[Simon Favre <simon@domain.elided>]

Brian Erdelyi asked the *eternal* question ;=)

>So what does Spider actually mean or refer to?

Back in the days when vehicles were pulled by REAL horsepower, and the
exhaust REALLY smelled bad, certain Italian coachbuilders (and that's
where that term comes from, too) started building open carriages with
tall wheels and lots of suspension travel (floppy springs) so Italian
families could take a ride out to the countryside on really bad roads
for a picnic. They called these open carriages Spiders because they
had the "long legs" needed to go over all the bumps on the crappy dirt
roads in the countryside. Somehow, the name stuck when Italian coach-
builders switched to steel and gas engines. In Italy, open cars were
called Spiders, though not exclusively. 

In the US, some early open cars were called roadsters. These generally
had NO top. To my way of thinking, the Viper and the Prowler are the 
only roadsters made in the US because they have no convertible top. By 
this definition, the Z3 is not a roadster. The Catherham 7 (Lotus 7 
replica) is. The Indy roadsters were really single-seat race cars, but
they were originally based on the roadster body type without fenders.

Just to make things even more confusing, you also had raceabouts, 
runabouts, drop-head-coupes, trasformables (Fiat 1200), and the ever-
popular good old fashioned convertible. (Isn't that what trasformable
means in Italian?) It just didn't seem to catch on as well as Spider.

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