The two seat Fixed Head Coupe

The tailgate opens sideways

This is the most commonly misdescribed feature on the car, so it is worth stating first. The coupe's rear door is side hinged. It is not a top hinged hatchback. Motor Sport described it correctly at the launch in April 1961 as a side hinged rear window panel, and the specialists describe it the same way. A great deal of writing about the E-Type gets this wrong.

The glass is a fixed screen let into the door, with separate upper and lower chrome finishers and a plastic finisher around the aperture. The seal is a single section of about 165cm. On Series 2 cars with a heated rear screen the wiring is visible from inside at the bottom corners of the hatch, which makes a heated screen claim checkable on sight.

The coupe's own rust zone

The tailgate is the coupe's signature corrosion site and it has no roadster equivalent. Two independent buying guides agree, in nearly identical words, that it corrodes around the seams, at the bottom edges and around the screen aperture. The mechanism is usually the seal: one perished section of rubber feeds water straight into the load floor and the rear structure.

Beyond that, the coupe rusts where every E-Type rusts. The front bulkhead and engine frame mountings come first, then sills, floors, rear arches, rear suspension mountings and the load floor.

The archive should be honest about two things it could not establish. Roof gutters and rear quarter windows are plausibly problem areas by analogy with other cars of the period, but no source consulted, including two club judging guides, the specialist metalworkers and three buying guides, says anything about either on the E-Type. Rather than assert it, the archive leaves it open.

Inside

The coupe replaces the roadster's separate boot with a continuous load floor behind the seats, reached through the side door. Motor Sport at the launch described a big area of luggage space with a lift up panel to prevent suitcases sliding forward. There is a coupe specific rear shelf structure, which the panel makers treat as its own sub assembly.

One detail general guides miss: the seat shapes differ between the roadster and the coupe on the 3.8 cars, so a coupe seat is not simply a roadster seat in a different car.

Coupe or roadster to restore

The archive could find no specialist willing to answer this head on, which is itself worth reporting. The trade addresses it obliquely and the pieces point in opposite directions.

• For the coupe: no hood, hood frame, hood envelope, tonneau or hardtop to source and retrim, which is an entire cost category the roadster carries. Its floors are less exposed. It has more welded upper structure and no documented flex symptoms.
• For the roadster: no tailgate, no hatch aperture, no hatch seal and no rear screen surround, so the coupe's own signature corrosion zone does not exist on it at all.
• Neither: one buying guide declines to nominate a body style and argues instead that the later the car, the more pleasure it gives in regular use.

One piece of trade evidence is revealing about the structure rather than the restoration. A specialist metalworking firm offers to convert a coupe tub to a roadster. That tells you the centre structure really is common between the two, and it tells you which body style the market pays more for. It does not tell you which is easier to restore.

It is not the 2+2

The two seat coupe and the 2+2 are different cars. The 2+2 sits on a floorpan nine inches longer, with a raised roofline, longer doors and occasional rear seats, and it has its own page. The two seat coupe ended with the Series 2 in October 1970. Every closed Series 3 is a 2+2, which is why the Series 3 chassis number list contains no coupe stream at all.