Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: What is generally considered to be the first production car model to offer a fully-enclosed passenger compartment?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you’re right!
Consider all the automotive body styles that are offered today. There are coupes, four-door coupes, wagon coupes, and of course SUVs, we can’t forget the SUVs or for that matter their less-capable cousins, the Crossovers. That variety wasn’t always available to the car buying public. In fact the very first automobiles were pretty much available in only one body style – which was a kind of an open buckboard.
Add just a few years time however, and body styles blossomed into a multitude of shapes and configurations. Most of those continued to maintain an open roof, inviting the weather, muddy roads, and the emissions of the then still common horses with which they shared those muddy roads, into the cabin. A fully enclosed body would eliminate those inconveniences, and the car that is generally considered to have been the first arrived in the last year of the Nineteenth Century.
From Wikipedia:

French maker Renault’s first car was simply called Voiturette, instead of the common usage then (it would have been called Renault 1¾ CV). The 1900 model (Voiturette C) was considered the first ever sedan (a car with roof) and it is largely seen as a predecessor for today’s Clio or the smaller Twingo.

The Voiturette debuted in both open and closed (Coupe) styles at the April 1900 Salon de l’automobile de Vincennes in France. The company received over 350 orders for the car from that show, and produced 179 that year.
The first enclosed American car is generally considered to be a 1905 Cadillac, designed for the personal use of then company general manager Henry Leland. Less than a decade later Hudson debuted a production car that they claimed to be a new body type – the Sedan – named after the enclosed Sedan Chairs wealthy people tooled around in ages before. That would become the template for four-door enclosed cars for years to come.
Image: voitures.renault.free.fr