"During the thirties and on into the early forties practically everybody – at one time or another – built convertible sedans. Plymouth offered one in 1939; the other Chrysler divisions had them earlier in the decade. Ford built lots of them – more than everyone else put together, probably – and both Mercury and Lincoln did their share. And at General Motors, four-door ragtops were produced by every division save one: Chevrolet.

The reader can imagine our surprise, then, when at a recent Chico, California concours we saw the car that Chevy never built: a 1941 Chevrolet Fleetline convertible sedan!"

I love phantom cars – that is, cars never built by the factory, but made to look like they could have been built from the factory. Usually, phantom cars are easily assembled by mixing and matching different pieces and trim from within a certain family of cars, but the 1941 Chevrolet Fleetline convertible sedan that Jay Nicholson built took quite a bit more effort, as he explained to Arch Brown in April 1984.

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