Convertible SUVs And Crossovers Are Inevitable So We Might As Well Figure Out How To Make Them Work

The right answer often comes along at the wrong time.

You might find the perfect partner, or have the ideal job offered to you on a plate, or make the networking home run that allows you to skip ahead two spaces in life, but if you’re too busy going to Burning Man or backpacking across Europe or otherwise occupied at the time, you’ll miss the opportunity for The Ideal Life of Tudor house in Westport, a Volvo wagon, retirement security, or whatever.

Car companies know this all too well. They can have the perfect mechanical solution or styling direction in a new model, but if the public isn’t ready, it’s bound to flop. In 1934 Chrysler presented a dramatic-looking sedan called the Airflow, with a wind-tunnel-developed shape for better fuel economy and top speed.

The buying public stayed away in droves from this radical new design. Even fifty years later, the next American manufacturer to apply practical, functional aerodynamics had to endure some referring to the cars as “jellybeans.” Thankfully, and despite the initial backlash, aerodynamically efficient shapes were almost universally accepted within relatively short order, and proved to be a life-saving gamble for 1980s Ford.

Market hesitance to good, even inevitable, ideas still happens today. See the (very silly) backlash to the original Prius, or the rabid contempt some have even now for battery-electric vehicles. But what I want to turn attention to now is the concept of convertible crossover SUVs. These make a lot of sense and are something that I feel absolutely will happen – I can almost guarantee it. Unfortunately, all of the attempts at an open-top soft-roader so far have met with resistance, to say the least. I think I can fix this.

A Topless Eagle?

Convertible crossovers might be a hard sell now, but nearly half a century ago even steel-roofed, tall-profile hatchbacks or wagons capable of mild off-pavement running were considered an oddity worthy of ridicule.

Always-struggling American Motors really had nothing to lose in the late seventies, and their Jeep off-road know-how was put into play by turning some of their aging Concord wagons, sedans, and coupes into surprisingly capable multi-terrain vehicles. Dubbed the Eagle, American Motors had arguably created the first crossover SUV. Some might claim that Subaru 4WD wagons really earned that title, but they lacked the Eagle’s central differential to allow for all-wheel drive in any condition; you’d have to pay tens of thousands more to get such a system on one of the few (if only) other cars to offer this back then: the UR Audi Quattro. Later, it was even possible to disconnect the front drive wheels on Eagles for better fuel economy (something that would be nice today as well).

First-year sales of 45,000 units were reasonable, but didn’t exactly point to a new trend, nor did they start one then. By 1984, only around half that number was produced; sales then fell off a cliff for the by-then-very-dated Eagle. AMC’s new owners- Chrysler- finally pulled the plug in 1988. Certainly, the Eagle had its fans, but many jokingly called it a “Hornet on stilts”, referring to the basic AMC car that Eagle started life as back in 1970. Talk about a car that was launched about twenty years too early.

If the Eagle wasn’t exactly a total flop, the convertible model that AMC dealers offered certainly was. Dubbed the Sundancer, this convertible started life as an Eagle coupe and was converted by Griffith, a company that was once famous for putting Ford V8s into TVRs and selling them in pre-regulation American.

Like many convertibles of the early eighties, the Sundancer was not a full roadster. The “B” pillars and roof section connecting them was kept in place for rigidity and ostensibly “rollover” protection. A removable roof section above the front seat while a canvas top over the rear seat folded back onto the package shelf.

Reportedly, only around 200 convertibles were built, and that number includes some standard non-Eagle Concord coupes as well so the actual number of all-wheel drive droptops is likely lower.

Nearly thirty years after the Sundancer bombed, you’d think that the next full convertible version of the now-ubiquitous crossover body style might stand a better chance at sales success. You’d be wrong.

Mura? No!

Somebody has to be first (or, if you count the Eagle, second) to do anything, and these pioneers are rewarded with either great success or the slings and arrows of a critical public. Sadly, for now-struggling Nissan, the latter was the case for the Murano CrossCabriolet. On paper, cutting the top off of the second generation of the swoopy Nissan crossover sounded like a fun, attractive proposition, but the end result was an oddly proportioned thing that was lambasted by the critics.

Land Rover tried again with the 2016 Evoque Convertible; critically it was better received but sold in similar numbers to the much-mocked Nissan before being dumped two years later.

Volkswagen’s 2020 T-Roc convertible fared slightly better, though there are some caveats. The T-Roc was a crossover version of the hyper-popular Golf; it replaced the standard boxy Golf cabriolet which seemed to be loved for its rather quirky looks anyway. Regardless, the open T-Roc has now been dropped from the lineup. Also, despite having the coolest hip-hop-sounding name of any car in recent memory, the open-topped T-Roc wasn’t sold in America, and that’s a must-do if you want to sell a solid number of drop tops. It was, in fact, Europe’s second best-selling convertible at around 11,000 units per year, but that’s a big slice out of a very small pie.

Why didn’t these soft-top soft-roaders succeed? Roofs have been chopped off tin tops for over a century. What made these things so saleproof?

Maybe A Convertible Juke Would Have Been Better?

Typically, turning a car into a roadster results in something significantly more attractive than the steel-topped model. However, doing this to the second generation of the swoopy Nissan crossover gave us something that our friend Doug Demuro described as “an overpriced convertible SUV that looks like an angry clothing iron”. I disagree; I think it looked like a fairly happy iron, but regardless this isn’t exactly a roadgoing object of desire.

Jason has mentioned the strange double rear window of the Murano CrossCabriolet as a point of contention, making the thing look even more like a mutant of some kind. The window apparently has to be there to allow a place for the roll bars to automatically deploy through when sensors detect an imminent rollover.

That feature does indeed look bizarre, but there’s a far bigger issue at play here drawing people’s ire. One aspect of convertibles that many take for granted is they’re often very much about being seen in. Throw on a scarf and you can look like a celebrity in your open-topped car. Sadly, with the Murano, that thick body section made driver and passenger look a bit like mushrooms on a massive log. If you don’t want to look like a kid with his head barely sticking out of a disproportioned “car” made from a giant cardboard appliance box, then you’re too sexy for this car (too sexy by far, in fact). Look how dinky this poor guy looks while driving this thing:

Indeed, a thirty second Photoshop crop animation of the old Murano CrossCabriolet below shows that even crudely cropping down the sides results in a vehicle that looks far more “normal”.

That’s the case with essentially all convertible crossovers. Unfortunately, considering that thick body section is what makes an SUV an SUV chopping it down like in the animation above isn’t an option. Still, I see a couple of different things to do with the Sawzall that might be better solutions than the ones we’ve already seen to a crossover convertible.

Idea One: Targa Style Top

Let’s get into the belly of the beast with the new 2025 Murano and actually make some soft-top versions of the current Nissan soft-roader. Here’s the stock guy right here:

Looking at these crossover convertibles, you have that thick body section and then nothing but a windshield and headrests sticking above the enormous mass. What if we helped to balance it out with more sheet metal above the beltline? The best idea might be to do a “targa top” style roof with connected “C” pillars forming a “targa bar” in back. Think of a large-scale Fiat X1/9 and that’s what we’re talking about.

Two more dumb tricks: note the black painted areas below the side windows to make the area look bigger, and the crease line that I added onto the doors and rear quarter panel (since those will be new panels we’d have to make for this version anyway). They don’t do much, but the more we can do to break up that massive visual side mass the better.

Now, the roof sections would be way too large and cumbersome to remove by hand, so we’d steal the mechanism idea from Mazda’s own Targa-topped Miata RF. The video below shows how that rear backlight lowers, the targa bar structure raises up and the roof lowers in place, hidden when the targa bar then drops back into position.

In addition to the visual benefits of this targa bar, you eliminate the need for “pop up” rollover protection components, and nobody is going to be able to slice your rigid roof with a box cutter.

Want to see a different approach? We’ve got more ideas.

Idea Two: Jeep Style

Nobody seems to laugh at what must easily be the best-selling off-road convertible there is now: the Jeep Wrangler! Somehow you just accept that it’s a functional machine, and the big roll cage up top (which they legally won’t call a “roll cage”) is just part of the whole package. The visual mass that it adds above the sort-of beltline visually works.

What if we try that on the Murano? In some ways, it’s like the overhead crossbar on the Mark I Rabbit/Golf Cabriolet which likely offered some structural rigidity as well as a suggestion of rollover protection. To beef it up some more, I’m thinking a double row of bars with a gap in between that would be filled with roll-down glass “opera” windows. Then we add some smaller “roll bars” in back to give a “fastback” look and a crossbar above and between the passengers that might hold dome lights or sunglass cases.

Suddenly the new Murano CrossCabriolet goes from trying-to-be-sexy car convertible to a sort-of rugged me-too Jeep. Also, I can promise you it won’t feel as wonky driving over railroad tracks as most drop tops with that extra structure as well.

Idea Three: Kidz Bunker

As I said earlier, I didn’t want to do a “normal” convertible version of the Murano since there’s no easy way of making it work. Sadly, my “art director” here, Jason, said that he “still wanted to see a full convertible”, and that a “tonneau with little portholes where passengers could see out might be a good idea”. Oh, Lord. Actually, that sounds like a terrible idea, but I unwittingly signed up for this shit and have to embrace the challenges.

A partial tonneau cover can, indeed, add some perceived sportiness to a car. Ford decided that the 1955-57 2-seater Thunderbird needed to grow two more seats to increase sales in 1958. It worked: sales skyrocketed but some lamented the loss of the original two-place car. As a consolation, Ford explored the idea (reportedly championed by then-Ford man Lee Iacocca) of the Thunderbird Sports Roadster. Introduced in 1962, this version of the T-Bird sported a fiberglass tonneau cover over the rear seats with built-in “headrests” that tapered back like on an old Mercedes 300SLR.

The top went up and down even with the tonneau in place, and it was easily removable if you wanted to use the rear seat. The idea never really caught on with sales only in the hundreds each year; it was continued to the “Thelma and Louise” style T-Bird like you see here but dropped after 1964.

Stil, Jason’s idea has a big problem: a tonneau tall enough to enclose adult rear passengers would need to be so big and tall as to no longer be a tonneau. It would look like a cap on the back of pickup truck.

However, what if you have kids with heads and car seats that don’t even stick above the tops of the seatbacks? They could indeed fit under a lift-up tonneau, and they’d still have little side window slits! Plus, the black areas on the tops of the “headrest” tubes would be skylights for the kids below (so they’ll get sun but you won’t have to worry about slathering them in a mess of sunscreen). The whole tonneau might even stop some buffeting for front-seat passengers and could be kept in place with the top up like on the old T-Bird (or, like that car, removed entirely).

Think about it: people in minvans with screaming kids in back would pull up next to your Murano and see a glamorous couple going around carefree al fresco and be jealous of those pre-child days. They’d have no idea that you actually had two or three annoying liabilities of your own in back!

Yeah, it’s still an absurd concept, but would you expect any less of Mr. Torchinsky? No, you would not.

You Can’t Stop The Drop

In the seventies, convertibles quickly disappeared from the market, but this didn’t mean that people weren’t interested in them. They went away because, at the time, the government reportedly was threatening to institute rollover standards on cares. Once those regulation failed to materialize, they started to reappear again with things like the 1982 Chrysler LeBaron (you just knew it would be Lee Iacocca, right?).

Today, raw statistics show that sales of convertibles are shrinking again: not even two percent of cars now sold are in this body style. However, I do wonder if this has less to do with disinterest in the drop-top itself than it does the fact that companies are making virtually no cars today that traditionally have been converted to convertibles, namely coupes or sedans.

What’s the point of living in California or even renting a car in Hawaii if you can’t have a drop top? To me, all signs are pointing to convertibles not disappearing but having to change with the times. If the crossover is the latest incarnation of the average vehicle, it seems inevitable that convertible SUVs are going to happen. We just have to avoid making them look like angry clothes irons.

Hate The Pointed Pyramid Roof On The Tesla CyberTruck? Let’s Chop It Off – The Autopian

Could A Two Door Model Pull a Coup D’Etat on Boring Crossovers? – The Autopian

The ‘Personal Luxury Coupe’ Car-Segment Used To Be Huge. Let’s Imagine If Toyota Got In On It In The 1980s – The Autopian

Let’s Raid The BMW Parts Bin To Make A Real Toyota Supra GT – The Autopian