1951 Chevrolet De Luxe Coupe

De Luxe coupe is a phrase that comes off an old dealer advertisement rather than off a factory chart, which is why it causes so much trouble in classified listings. Chevrolet never built a car whose name was simply the 1951 De Luxe Coupe. What it built were three coupes inside the De Luxe series, and depending on who wrote the ad, any one of the three might turn up under that heading.

If you are shopping and somebody sends you a 1951 De Luxe coupe, this page is the two minutes that tells you which of the three you are actually being offered, and what the difference is worth.

The three coupes inside the 1951 De Luxe series

The De Luxe series was numbered 2100. Inside it, Chevrolet built four Styleline bodies with two doors: the sport coupe, the Bel Air, the convertible and the two-door sedan. The factory identification chart calls the convertible a convertible coupe, which is where a good deal of the confusion starts. Three of those four are coupes by anybody's reckoning.

Three cars, three roofs, a $370 spread from the cheapest to the dearest when they were new, and a much wider one today. The one at the top of the table is the one most people mean, because it is the ordinary De Luxe coupe and there were nearly sixty-five thousand of them.

What De Luxe actually bought you

Take the Special sport coupe and the De Luxe sport coupe. Same body, same doors, same glass, same roof, and $100 between them in 1951. That hundred dollars went on things you can see and one thing you cannot.

What you see is the stainless side molding starting above the front fender and running back onto the front door, the name spelled out above the front wheel opening, and a better interior: nicer cloth, a nicer dash treatment, more bright trim around the glass. On the Bel Air the interior goes further again, with leather available and bright metal bows across the headliner in the pattern of a folding top.

What you cannot see is the option list. Powerglide was a De Luxe option, priced around $159, and it came only with the larger 235.5 cubic inch six rated at 105 horsepower. A Special could not be ordered with either. So a genuine factory automatic 1951 Chevrolet coupe is by definition a De Luxe coupe, and that is one of the few claims in this hobby you can check from the driver's seat.

"The hundred dollars between a Special and a De Luxe bought trim and a chance at the automatic. Seventy-five years later the trim is what people pay for and the automatic is what they want. Funny how that turned around."

— Earl Dawson

Telling the three apart, and telling a fake

The roof settles it every time.

A post between the door glass and the quarter glass means the sport coupe, model 2124. Wind both windows down and there is still steel in the middle of the opening.

No post at all means the Bel Air. Both windows down and the whole side of the car is open. That is the pillarless hardtop that arrived at Chevrolet for 1950, and it is the single most valuable thing about the car.

A folding top means the convertible, model 2134. Worth checking the body for a hardtop that has had its roof cut off, which happens more often than anybody likes to admit. A factory convertible has reinforcement in the floor and the rocker area that a converted hardtop does not, and the serial number sequence will not match the body tag.

Which one to go and look at

The sport coupe is the sensible answer, and I say that as somebody who likes the Bel Air a great deal. It has the De Luxe trim, it has the same access to Powerglide and the 235, it seats four properly, and it has a steel post holding everything where it belongs. It also asks a good deal less than a Bel Air in the same condition, because the badge is worth real money.

The Bel Air is the one to buy if you want the car people recognise, and if you are prepared for the roof. The convertible is the one to buy if you already know you want a convertible, because nobody talks themselves into one.

For the ordinary De Luxe coupe on its own, in detail, go to the Styleline De Luxe Sport Coupe. For the whole De Luxe series and what separated it from the Special, that is the 1951 Chevrolet Styleline De Luxe. And if you are still working out which coupe you want across both series, all four of them are laid out in the 1951 Chevrolet coupe.

Sources and notes

• 1951 Chevrolet passenger car models chart, The Old Car Manual Project - the factory table naming model 2124 sport coupe, 2154 Bel Air and 2134 convertible coupe inside series 2100, and 1504 business coupe in series 1500 only.
• 1951 Chevrolet De Luxe Series specifications, Conceptcarz - factory prices, shipping weights and production totals for the De Luxe sport coupe, Bel Air and convertible.
• 1951 Chevrolet Special Series specifications, Conceptcarz - the Special sport coupe at $1,550 against the De Luxe at $1,650, and the business coupe confined to the Special series.
• Chevrolet Deluxe, Wikipedia - Powerglide offered only on De Luxe and Bel Air models, the 216.5 and 235.5 engines, and the Bel Air's cord and leather-grain trim.
• 1950: the birth of the Chevrolet Bel Air, Mac's Motor City Garage - the pillarless hardtop roof arriving for 1950, the bright headliner bows, and the Bel Air as the most expensive coupe in the range.
• 1951 Chevrolet Styleline De Luxe listings, ClassicCars.com - live inventory, including how loosely the phrase De Luxe coupe gets used in listing titles.