I know the Alfa was a spider, but why did they all get labelled that?

Alfa Spider

It’s because it’s got four wheels, and alfa spider has four legs.

Something about the Italians calling it “Speeder”, the English thought they meant “Spider” and the rest is history, or at least that’s what FIL told me.

Parachuting spiders drop in and nest in the folded double duck so they can infest your inner ear/eye sockets at the first sign of a downpour.

I thought it was because they had a-rack-ind steering.

Easy – it sounds expensive. The order goes ‘Convertible’, ‘Cabriolet’, ‘Targa’, ‘Spyder’. (I’ve probably missed a few)

The same as estates – ‘Estate’, ‘Avant’, ‘Shooting Brake’.

The Porsche Spyder pre-dates the Alfa by a decade so I doubt that’s right Bimbler.

from a horse drawn carriage called a spider because of its 8 legs

Something about the Italians calling it “Speeder”, the English thought they meant “Spider”

I had an Italian boss once who came into work on Monday morning distraught that someone had stolen his cart. He was very upset but none of us could work out quite why he had a cart in the first place and why he would be so upset that it had been stolen.

After some discussion someone did go ahead and ask why he had a cart. It told us it was to keep him company which only confused us even more. he become more irate about us not getting how important his cart was to him until he showed us a picture of it.

From Wikipedia:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the car body. For other uses of “Spider” or “Spyder”, see Spider (disambiguation).
Spyder or Spider is a term for a convertible car body style.
Contents

1 Origin
1.1 Porsche
1.2 Later years
2 Spyders
3 Spyder in name only
4 See also

Origin

As with other automotive terms, the term derives from horse-drawn carriages. A “spider” was a lighter version of a phaeton, having narrower, spindly wheels and two-seat accommodation. The name implied an extremely rudimentary top mechanism originating from a small two-seat horse-cart with a folding sunshade made of four bows; with its black cloth top and exposed sides for air circulation it resembled an eight-legged spider. This term was subsequently applied to automobiles.
Alternatively, a native Italian who has had no English influence in the pronunciation would pronounce “spyder” or “spider” as speeder. Thus a car labeled by an Italian car manufacturer as “Spyder” or “Spider” is intended to be simply a “speeder” or a sports car. (Aston Martin used to have a car labeled “spyder” but now have a model labeled “Volante”, an Italian word that translates into English as “speeder”.)

Porsche

Contrary to popular belief, the first car to be officially called a “spyder” was not the Porsche 550 Spyder. Aston Martin produced a spyder in the same year. Spyder is found on a wide assortment of car names since the advent of the automobile—for example, the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Spyder that won the Mille Miglia in 1938, before Porsche existed, by Biondetti of the Scuderia Ferrari team—but arguably did not receive particular notoriety or significance until the popularity of James Dean’s 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, “Lil *******”, which he was driving when he died.

Later years

Other later spyders include Mitsubishi, numerous Ferraris and later Porsches. However, the most significant and known model to wear this name was the Fiat 124 Spider/Pininfarina Spider, of which approximately 200,000 were manufactured, of which 75% were sold in United States.

Because when you find a spider and catch it, feel it between your fingers and give it a little stroke (they don’t mind this). You will find the top of its abdomen is quite soft.

Because when you find a spider and catch it, feel it between your fingers and give it a little stroke (they don’t mind this). You will find the top of its abdomen is quite soft.

😯 – shudders

I hate spiders and the thought of stroking a soft abdomen makes me cringe

I’m disappointed both at the lack of spider puns and at the lack of the response to the ones provided so far.

That’s the trouble with the World Wide…

I can’t go through with it. Sorry.

Easy – it sounds expensive. The order goes ‘Convertible’, ‘Cabriolet’, ‘Targa’, ‘Spyder’. (I’ve probably missed a few)

The same as estates – ‘Estate’, ‘Avant’, ‘Shooting Brake’

Wrong. A Targa is quite different, this implies a removable roof section but with the surrounding area remaining present (usually the centre of the roof lifts out and rear and side windows remain.
A Shooting Brake is technically a one-off, or at least limited number, conversion of another car into an estate, although the name has been misused by certain companies lately. This derives from hunting carriages, and Estate similarly derives from their use on big hunting estates.
.
Cars with no roof and little or no bodywork are known as tarantulas (Aerial Atom for example) The ‘exoskeleton’ chassis looks like tarantula’s legs.

Something about the Italians calling it “Speeder”, the English thought they meant “Spider” and the rest is history, or at least that’s what FIL told me.

Tell him that the Mitsubishi starrion was so called in the uk due to a miscommunicated phone call between the marketing dept in Japan and their English counterparts. Bet he laps it up…

Targa = shield

Tanga = pants

Top down motoring. The wind in your hair, the sun in your eyes and the flies in your teeth. That’s why. The women that drive them have hairy legs too. And they eat their husbands.