Hot hatch

Hot hatch (shortened from hot hatchback) is a high-performance derivative of a car body style consisting of a three- or five-door hatchback automobile. The performance upgrades of a hot hatch are sometimes available for the estate variant of the car, often called sportwagons.

Vehicles of this class are based on family-oriented automobiles, and are equipped with an uprated more powerful internal combustion engine, improved suspension, and may also include additional "aerodynamic" body parts and larger wheels and tyres. Front-mounted petrol engines, together with front-wheel drive, is the most common powertrain layout, although some can be specified as diesel-powered, and rear or four-wheel drive hot hatches are also available.

The term hot hatch gained widespread use during the 1980s in the UK, first as 'hot hatchback' by 1983 and then shortened to 'hot hatch' in the motoring press in 1984, and first appeared in The Times in 1985, and is now commonly and widely accepted as a mainstream, if still informal term. It is retrospectively applied to cars from the late 1970s but was not a phrase used at the time.

Within the United States, hot hatches are classified along with saloons and small coupes as sport compacts and elsewhere the term sport sedan is often used.

Some sports cars are hatchback in form, but as they are not upgraded small family cars, they are not classified as hot hatches. Cars such as the Porsche 928, Porsche Panamera, Reliant Scimitar GTE and Ferrari FF have not been classified in print as hot hatches.

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Wikipedia