10 Forgotten 1990s Convertibles No One Talks About Anymore

By Mike Bartholomew

The inexpensive convertible is a dying breed these days. While a decent number of luxury and performance cars still come as drop-tops, if you want something at the more affordable end of the market, you're pretty much limited to the Mazda MX-5 Miata, Ford Mustang, or Mini Cooper Convertible.

The lack of affordable convertibles wasn't always the way, though. In the 1990s, the convertible market was booming. Here are 10 cabriolets from that era that we don't think get the love they deserve. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Alfa Romeo Spider S4

An Aging Italian With A ’90s Facelift

The arrival of the original Mazda Miata in 1989 was hailed as the return of the classic two-seater, rear-wheel-drive roadster, but at Alfa Romeo, this type of vehicle never really went away. The company simply kept building a vehicle similar to the one it had launched in 1966.

Sure, the Alfa Spider's styling would be gradually updated over the years. However, there was no getting around the fact that by the time the Series 4 car was launched in 1990, it was a 24-year-old platform, wearing yet another heavy facelift to keep the product competitive. Still, the appeal of its recipe was Alfa's fizzy dual-overhead camshaft four-cylinder was something that never really went away.

The S4 Spider was short-lived, with the model dying off in 1993, a couple of years shy of the platform's 30th birthday. It was replaced by an all-new front-wheel-drive Spider that same year, but with Alfa's North American market exit already on the horizon, the product never came to the US.

Audi Cabriolet

A Muscular Drop-Top Fit For A Princess

We have to imagine it was a Friday afternoon when the meeting was held to decide on the name of the first convertible ever to be sold under the Audi brand. It would be called the Audi Cabriolet. Then again, the Cabriolet, launched in 1991, was itself based on the two-door version of the 80 sedan, which was given the equally unimaginative moniker of Audi Coupe.

Thankfully, Audi of the ’90s was much better at engineering cars than at naming them, and the Cabriolet was a well-built car that, in Europe, came with a range of engines, including a four-cylinder, a turbo five-cylinder, and a meaty V6. It was a hit on its home continent, where sales were boosted in 1994 when Audi was given the best bit of marketing money can't buy, due to tabloid images of Princess Diana driving her green Cabriolet around the fancier parts of London.

Sales in Europe lasted from 1991 to 2000, long after the sedan it was based on had been superseded by the first A4, but in the US, the Cabriolet was far less successful. Offered only with a 2.8-liter V6 in the country, it was sold between 1993 and 1998, and only just managed to hit four-figure sales most of those years.

Buick Reatta Convertible

A Short-Lived Halo Car That Failed

Buick built plenty of convertibles in its heyday, but the drop-top version of the Reatta that arrived in 1990 would be its last before the equally forgotten Cascada arrived over 25 years later.

The Reatta as a whole was a fascinating car. Intended as a flagship for Buick, it sat on the contemporary Riviera's front-wheel drive platform and used Buick's venerable 3.8-liter V6. The car was pretty advanced at launch in 1988, with fully independent suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, and even an early central touchscreen display, which used CRT technology and now looks almost hilariously outdated.

The Reatta was also a total flop. Buick wanted to sell 20,000 a year, but it had barely broken that figure when production wrapped up four years later. The convertible version was late to the party, only arriving in 1990, by which time the infamous touchscreen display had already been dropped.

Honda Del Sol

A Targa-Top Oddity With A Bonkers Roof Arrangement

Although positioned as a successor to the beloved CRX, including being branded as the CR-X Del Sol in certain markets, the Del Sol was similar to its predecessor only in that they were both small, front-wheel-drive Honda sport compacts. Where the CRX had been a boxy, kamm-tailed coupe, the del Sol was extremely ’90s due to its smooth, bar-of-soap styling.

More notably, the Del Sol was only available with a removable roof panel. While on US cars, that roof could only be detached manually, Europe and Japan received an option called the TransTop, an absurdly complex system even by today's standards that lifted the trunk lid to above the roofline, then sent out two mechanical arms to grab the roof panel and stash it under the trunk lid before the whole baffling contraption was lowered back into place.

It's absolutely one of the most bizarre, needlessly complex ways ever devised for getting the roof off a convertible, and somewhat overshadows what was quite a feisty little car, available from 1994 with a revvy, VTEC-equipped B16 1.6-liter engine producing 160 hp.

Mercury Capri

An Aussie Roadster With A European Name And A Japanese Heart

The Mercury Capri name has appeared on three separate vehicles. They were all two-door sports cars, but each one was very different. There was the import of the original European Ford Capri, and the second was a slightly more upmarket version of the Fox-body Mustang. Perhaps the most curious, though, was the third generation, which arrived in 1991.

Looking to plug the sports-car-shaped hole in Mercury's lineup, Ford once again looked to one of its overseas divisions, this time Ford Australia, which had just recycled the Capri badge on a two-seater, front-wheel-drive roadster sitting on Mazda 323 underpinnings (Ford, at this point, owned a significant stake in Mazda).

Ford Australia started building the Capri in left-hand drive, which was then shipped to the States and given Mercury badges. Power came from 1.6-liter Mazda engines, optionally turbocharged to the tune of 132 hp, but it could never compete with Mazda's own Miata. As a result, the Capri's run in the US was short-lived, with production winding up in 1994.

Sources: Volvo, Toyota Owner's Club, Porsche, Mitsubishi, Ford, Stellantis, Volkswagen

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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.