Eh. The only thing I'm trying to convince you of is that when it comes to cars, semantics start to get kind of crummy. Now, I'm not pulling these words to pick a fight or anything, but just to show how in depth definitions can become and how our common understanding and acceptance of what something is or isn't can change over time.

"Coupe" is something with two doors. "Sedan" is something with four.

Sedans are any car that has an A, B, and C pillar. Two door sedans exist and if we were to go by the author's argument that the Ford Mustang is a sedan, by the definition Wikipedia gives us, he's technically right. Just look at this picture of an S-197. Right there, in bright red, is a B Pillar. Though if we were to start fretting, I'd worried about whether or not it'd be appropriate to actually call it a sedan because it's very easy to argue that it doesn't have “adequate passenger space in the rear compartment for adult passengers.” I'm not a very big man. Even I feel cramped in the back seat of a Mustang.

Similarly, coupes also have their own elaborate definition and criteria and while it takes a bit of scrolling, towards the bottom of the article you can see that there are four door coupes in existence.

Here's where I think semantics start to get crazy and a little silly. I'd honestly and with a straight face call a Mustang a sports car. Just like a lot of people would argue that whether a car should be called a sedan or a coupe rests soley on the number of doors its rocking, I'd say that any car that is built solely for performance can be called a sports car. Not a roadster, but a car built for sport. Both the S-197 and the S-550 Mustangs were built from the ground up with performance in mind. Unlike prior generations, they do not share any underpinnings with more pedestrian cars such the Falcon or Fairmont. In my mind, that makes them sports cars just like I think my FR-S is a sports car. Am I technically wrong? Yeah. Colloquially speaking could I be right? Arguably.

SUVs are station wagons. They have limited utility and aren't sporty at all. Like "Crossover" it's a marketing term. The DMV still calls them "station wagons" and they're right.

I hope you don't think of me as a dick for what I'm about to say, but even this is arguable. The Chevy Blazer was based off the S-10. It's arguably a truck. The Vista Cruiser was built from the same chassis as the Oldsmobile Cutlass. It's arguably a car. No matter how the DMV would want to classify them, the DNA for those two vehicles are very different. If I were to buy a fifth gen El Camino tomorrow and register it with the DMV, they would make me register it as a truck, even though it shares the same chassis as the Monte Carlo. I think one of the best examples that I can think of off the top of my head would be the PT Cruiser, which as far as CAFE standards are concerned, is classified as a minivan.

What really messes everything up, at least from what I can gather, is that different people want to use different terms to suit their needs. Marketing companies will call cars one thing in hopes of gaining sales. Engineers will call them something else, because to them being technically correct is not only the best kind of correct, but communicating the correct terms is an essential part of their job. Somewhere in between, you have the lawyers, regulators, and bureaucrats, erasing one shade of gray and filling in the gap with something slightly grayer to suit their needs. Then there's a guy like me, who would be more than happy to debate that the latest two generations of Mustangs deserve to be called sports cars because of how they were designed, while the Ford Focus ST and Fiesta ST don't deserve to be called sports cars, all because they're performance variants to standard commuter models. That guy two towns over that is chomping at the bit for the Ford Focus RS to hit the dealer though? He'd probably argue otherwise.