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If I were to purchase one, it would be either a 1963 Silver Cloud III SCT 100 or a new Hyperion Coupe.
Hyperion was a one-off (and not a coupe).
It looks like a coupe to me.
It was really a Pininfarina-Rolls Royce project and it most certainly is a coupe.
I mean, it's based on the phantom drop-head coupe.
If it's not a coupe, then what would you classify it as?
People tend to have wonky interpretations of the word coupe these days. A lot of people tend to associate it with a "hardtop" 2-door, 2-seat car, and tend to treat the convertible version as a separate entity calling it a "convertible" or "roadster". We're all probably better off using proper British/French names for things (as they tend to still have such things).
A cabriolet?
I'm not going to quote you the dictionary here, but all definitions of "coupe" that I've ever seen are of a hard-top vehicle. Significantly, I've seen "cabriolet" defined as "a convertible coupe" which would seem to indicate that a coupe is, by definition, not convertible.
Let's call it a coupe-convertible then
Just to add some confusion to this whole affair, please consider that the terms were developed long before cars were on the roads. The names came from the days of horse-drawn coaches. However, in the original automotive coachbuilder's parlance:
A landau is an open chauffer-driven car easily identified by the folding top's external hinged arms (sometimes referred to as "landau bars.") The chauffeur's area is separated from the passenger area by a bulkhead. Typically, a landau is made for four passengers seated upon two bench style seats. Originally, the seats faced each other. Later, most landaus were built with both seat rows facing forward. The landau's folding top can extend forward to cover the chauffeur's area in poor weather conditions.
CoupÃ
A cabriolet is a two or four passenger open car with a folding top characterized by the absence of external landau arms. The body may have either two or four doors. Driver and passenger areas blur in distinction since a chauffeur is not always utilized and no bulkhead separates the driver's area from the passengers.
A roadster is an open car of two or four seats and no top at all or having top/frame components usually stored in the luggage area and only assembled/installed as necessary. More often than not roadsters have no permanent side windows. Plastic and/or fabric side curtains can be installed on the door's upper edge when the top is fitted.
A spider/spyder is simply an open car with multi-tubular framework to support the body. No particular style of top is identified as belonging to spider/spyder.
A convertible (one supposes) is the lazy man's way of covering all bases in describing cars that lack a permanently fixed roof.
Of course, all these terms went out the window and into the dust heap when cars went into mass production. The chauffeur and dividing bulkhead quickly became anachronisms and open cars were whatever you wanted to call them. A quick Google image search will make your head spin with so many contradictory photo captions. Traditions change with the times.
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