A landau is a type of four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage with a distinctive folding top, first built in the German city of Landau in the 18th century. The term later carried over into the automotive world, where it describes a specific roof style on cars. Depending on context, you might also encounter “landau” as a surname in science or medicine, but the carriage and car meanings are by far the most common.
The Original Landau Carriage
The landau carriage seated four passengers on two bench seats facing each other, with a raised front seat for the coachman. What set it apart from other carriages was its two folding hoods, one at each end, that could be raised to meet in the middle and form a fully enclosed cabin with side windows. When both hoods were folded down, the carriage became completely open-air. This flexibility made it popular for both formal occasions and leisurely rides.
It was a heavy vehicle, typically pulled by a team of four horses, and became widely used in England from the 18th century onward. The word “landau” first appeared in English in 1743, taken directly from the name of the German city where these carriages were originally produced.
Landau Roofs on Cars
When automobiles arrived, the landau concept came along. In early car design, a landau referred to a closed body with a rear roof section that could actually fold open, using hinged joints called landau joints. The S-shaped metal brackets on the sides of the roof, known as landau bars, were originally functional hardware that supported this folding mechanism.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the meaning started to shift. American automakers began covering fixed metal roofs with fabric or leather and bolting decorative S-shaped chrome bars to the sides, giving the appearance of a convertible top without any actual folding capability. The landau had gone from a functional feature on custom-built cars to a purely cosmetic one on production models.
The term fell out of use from the mid-1940s through the late 1950s, then came roaring back. Between 1970 and 1979, over 40 percent of all domestically produced American cars (roughly 38.1 million vehicles) were built with padded vinyl tops, and the landau style was among the most popular. The Chevrolet Monte Carlo Landau was the biggest seller of the bunch, while Ford offered the Thunderbird Landau with simulated landau bars through 1976. Cadillac featured a factory landau roof option on its Fleetwood Series 75 limousine.
Landau vs. Landaulet
A related term you may come across is “landaulet” (or “landaulette” in British English). While a full landau has a folding top covering the entire passenger cabin, a landaulet is a cut-down version where only the rear passengers sit under a convertible top. The driver’s section stays fully enclosed, similar to a limousine with a partition separating the front and back.
This distinction carried into modern luxury cars. Maybach produced a 62 S Landaulet with a retractable soft top over just the rear passenger compartment, and Mercedes-Maybach introduced the G 650 Landaulet SUV in 2017, limited to 99 units worldwide. In both cases, the idea is the same one from the 1700s: rear passengers get open-air seating while the driver stays covered.
Other Uses of the Name
If you came across “Landau” in a science or medical context, it likely refers to a person rather than a vehicle.
Lev Landau was a Soviet physicist whose work touched so many areas of physics that dozens of concepts carry his name: Landau damping in plasma physics, Landau levels in quantum mechanics, and Landau phase transition theory, among many others. His contributions were broad enough that physics students encounter his name across nearly every subfield.
In medicine, Landau-Kleffner syndrome is a rare childhood neurological condition first described in 1957. It typically appears in children between ages 3 and 8 who had been developing normally. The hallmark is a sudden loss of language ability: a child who previously spoke and understood language begins having difficulty processing spoken and written words. Over days to months, expressive language deteriorates as well. About two-thirds of affected children also experience seizures, most commonly during sleep. The condition is also known as acquired aphasia with epilepsy.