What Is a Coachbuilder? The Craft Behind the Bespoke Car

Before a car had a brand, it had a maker and a coachbuilder. The first built the machinery. The second built everything you saw and sat in.

The word

Coach comes from Kocs, a town in Hungary famous for its carriages. The word coachbuilder appears in written English in 1794. In French the firm is a carrosserie and the craftsman a carrossier. (Coachbuilder on Wikipedia)

From carriages to cars

Coachbuilders began with horse-drawn carriages, and by the mid-nineteenth century the craft was highly specialised. The oldest houses are older than the car itself: Barker of London was founded in 1710, and Brewster, the oldest in the United States, in 1810. When the motor car came, they simply changed what sat under the body.

The rolling chassis

In the early motor age, prestige carmakers sold a rolling chassis: frame, engine, gearbox, axles and wheels. The client took it to a coachbuilder, who built the body and the interior to order. That is how the maharajas’ cars were made; the saffron Star of India of 1934 was bodied by Thrupp & Maberly. Read the Maharajas and their motor cars.

Every country had its great names: Hooper, H. J. Mulliner and Park Ward in Britain; Pininfarina, Touring and Zagato in Italy; Saoutchik and Figoni et Falaschi in France.

The decline

In the 1950s and 1960s carmakers moved to unibody construction, where the body itself is the structure. There was no separate chassis left to body. Most coachbuilders closed, and the survivors became design studios, bus builders or makers of special vehicles.

The return

The idea never died, and it has come back. Rolls-Royce revived one-off coachbuilding with the Sweptail of 2017 and the Boat Tail of 2021. Armoured cars, Pullmans and landaulets are coachbuilt by nature, because each one is rebuilt around its purpose. Read what a Pullman is and what a landaulet is.

DARTZ, a carrosserie

DARTZ comes from coachbuilding in both senses. It traces its heritage to the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory in Riga, which built railway carriages before it built cars, and whose interior workshops, DARTZ says, decorated royal train coaches. The press once called DARTZ tuners, and DARTZ admits that in its early years it balanced armour with spoilers and leather. By 2008 it had become a carrosserie, building its own Prombron’ BONDs, with interiors designed by its revived Department of Opulence. Read how to commission a DARTZ and the Department of Opulence.