Some of the convertibles on the market were designed that way from the ground up. Think Mazda MX-5 or Ferrari Ferrari California. Most of them, however, were derived from coupes and had their roofs chopped off – models like the Ford Mustang, Audi TT, BMW 4 Series, Bentley Continental GT, Lamborghini Huracan… or just about any other drop-top on the road today.

There have been a few, though, that came out first as convertibles and were only converted into coupes afterwards. It’s a bit of an anomaly, but it’s been known to happen. Here are seven roadsters that bucked the trend and drove the opposite direction in a business that often seems hard-wired to follow convention.

Chevrolet Corvette


If it seems to you like a lot of the Corvettes out on the road are convertibles, the reason could be in its DNA. Never mind that even coupes have removable roof panels – the original Corvette came only as a roadster. That was way back in 1953, and it remained a convertible-only model until the second-generation C2 came along in 1963. The original Stingray was the first Corvette coupe, with its signature split rear window, and it wouldn’t be until 1969 that the coupe began to outsell the convertible.

Dodge Viper


The Vette wouldn’t be the first American sports car to debut in open-top form before getting a closed roof. The same applies for the Shelby Cobra, years before the Daytona coupe came out… as would its successor many years later. The first-generation Dodge Viper emerged in 1992 only in roadster form, not to be joined by the GTS coupe until 1995. The second-generation Viper was offered in both forms, but the third-generation model that’s now on its way out never lost its top altogether.

Porsche Boxster


Don’t let their separate nameplates fool you: the Boxster and Cayman are essentially the same model. That could be why Porsche has finally linked them with the number 718. But let’s not forget that it was the Boxster convertible that came out first. In fact the first-generation Boxster (launched in 1996) never did get that fixed roof, with the Cayman arriving only with the second-generation model.

BMW Z3


The Boxster wasn’t the only small German roadster launched in the mid-90s. Mercedes also launched the SLK in 1996, after BMW introduced the Z3 the year before. With its innovative folding hardtop, the SLK never saw a fixed-roof version, but the Z3 did – and it was a bit of an oddball. Instead of making a coupe in the traditional sense, BMW turned the Z3 into a modern shooting brake with an extended (instead of sloping) roofline. Of the nearly 300,000 units of the Z3 that BMW made between 1995 and 2002, less than 18,000 were delivered as coupes.

Pontiac Solstice


Even more rare was the Pontiac Solstice Coupe. Following the roadster’s launch in 2005, the coupe version arrived in 2008 – albeit still with a removable roof panel, much like the Corvette. Pontiac made 64,000 Solstice convertibles, but just 1,266 coupes before the division was shut down altogether (taking its entire model line with it) as part of GM’s massive restructuring.

Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG


Wait a second, didn’t the Mercedes SL debut as a coupe? Well, actually it did, with the 300 SL immortalized as the iconic Gullwing. The next two iterations were offered as coupes as well, but by the fourth, Mercedes had done away with the fixed-roof version and offered the R129-generation only as a roadster. That’s been the status quo ever since, with one notable exception: when AMG transformed the SL65 into the hardcore Black Series model in 2008, one of the biggest weight-saving measures it implemented was to replace the heavy folding hardtop with a fixed roof. Between that and the widespread use of carbon fiber, the Black Series weighed a solid 550 pounds less than the roadster on which it was based, but still packed a 6.0-liter twin-turbo V12 up front, rated at 661 horsepower.

Jaguar F-Type


Like most automakers, Jaguar tends to launch its convertibles either after or together with their fixed-roof counterparts. That’s the way it went down with the E-Type, XJ-S, and XK8. But its first convertible and its most recent first hit the scene as roadsters. Like the XK120 decades before it, the current F-Type only tacked on a roof after its open-air version was already on the road.