A fastback is a car whose roof falls in one continuous line from its highest point to the rear of the body, with no step down to a separate boot. The word describes a silhouette, not a kind of door or tailgate, which is why it gets confused with the notchback and the hatchback so often. Two cars can share the same sloping profile and yet open in completely different ways at the back.

The shape has been with motoring since the 1930s aerodynamic era, but it came into its own on British cars of the 1960s and 1970s, when stylists used the long tapering tail to make a saloon or a sports car look faster standing still.

An orange 1969 Marcos GT, front three-quarter view, its low glassfibre fastback body parked at a classic-car show
A Marcos GT. The low glassfibre shell is a pure fastback, the roofline running unbroken from screen to tail.Photo by Dave Hamster / CC BY 2.0

What the word describes

The defining feature is the single, uninterrupted line. On a fastback the roof and the rear screen flow into the tail as one surface, meeting the back of the car low down rather than dropping to a flat boot lid. The result is a teardrop, or half-teardrop, side view.

It is purely a matter of profile. A fastback can be a two-door sports car, a four-door saloon, or a two-seat coupe. What it cannot be is upright at the back: the moment the roofline steps down to a distinct boot, the car becomes a notchback instead.

Fastback, notchback and hatchback: telling them apart

Three words get used as if they meant the same thing. They do not.

  • Fastback describes the roofline: an unbroken slope to the tail.
  • Notchback describes the opposite roofline: a roof that drops in a step, or notch, to a separate raised boot. This is the classic three-box saloon shape.
  • Hatchback describes how the back opens: a rear door, hinged at the top, that lifts the rear window with it. It says nothing about the roofline at all.

Because the first two describe shape and the third describes access, they can combine freely. A car with this roofline and a fixed roof over an ordinary boot lid is still one. A version whose whole tail lifts up as a tailgate is a liftback. A sporting body whose roof instead runs level to the tail to form a load bay is a shooting brake, the estate-roofed member of the family. And a boxy supermini with a near-vertical tailgate is a hatchback without the sloping shape at all.

British examples worth knowing

The roofline runs right through the British classic era:

  • The Ford Capri wore perhaps the best-known mass-market British example, the long bonnet and dropping tail that sold it as affordable glamour from 1969.
  • The Sunbeam Rapier of 1967 traded the earlier Rapier’s pillarless hardtop for a full sloping tail, often compared to a scaled-down American coupe of the period.
  • The Jensen Interceptor finished its sloping roof in a vast wraparound rear screen, one of the most distinctive glass tails of any British grand tourer.
  • The Marcos built its glassfibre sports cars around a low, pure version of the line, the shape doing much of the talking on a tiny budget.
  • The MG MGB GT took the open MGB and added a Pininfarina-styled sloping roof, turning a roadster into a compact closed coupe.

The fixed-head Jaguar E-Type belongs on the same list, its coupe roof a textbook example of the form.

Why the shape mattered

For stylists the shape was a way to make ordinary mechanicals look exotic. A long tapering tail reads as speed, and on cars that were rarely fast in a straight line, the profile sold the promise. It also carried a genuine aerodynamic logic at a time when drag was becoming a selling point, even if the styling usually ran ahead of the wind-tunnel gains.

For the buyer today it is worth knowing that the word on its own tells you only about the look. Whether a particular car has a practical lifting tailgate, or a small fixed boot you load through a letterbox opening, is a separate question, and one that changes how usable the car is to live with.