Car coat
outer garment originally made to be worn by automobile drivers
A car coat is an outer garment originally made to be worn by automobile drivers and passengers. First designed to provide maximum warmth and coverage, over time it became a much shorter garment. Today it describes a coat that typically ends at mid thigh. It is worn by both men and women.
While fur, leather and heavy wool were preferred in the early days, today the coat may be made in a wide variety of materials. In the period after World War II, it took on design elements of the jeep coat worn by servicemen and this is when the shorter length became common. As car ownership grew so did the popularity of the coat; by the 1960s it was described as "ubiquitous". The car coat remains popular today, both as a functional and a fashion garment.
Early history of the car coat
Originally the car coat was more usually termed 'motoring dress'. It emerged in the early 1900s, when driving was considered an outdoor sport (most cars were open top) and required protective clothing.
“Car coat” enters the record as outer garment originally made to be worn by automobile drivers. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what coat, outer and garment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Car coat” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, coat, outer and garment provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24944293. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Car coat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.