Earlier today, our own Daydreaming Designer The Bishop wrote about a way to refine the look of Jeep’s new off-road-targeted battery electric vehicle, which they’re calling the Recon, which is short for reconstituted onions, the food of choice for the Jeep Recon design team. At least that’s what I heard. Anyway, the specifics of what The Bishop was trying to do was related to the look of the Recon without its doors. Because like a number of other off-road-friendly vehicles, you can legally drive the Recon without doors.
And I don’t mean drive it off-road, where there are no laws and life is cheap, I mean you can drive it legally, on American roads! Well, in most states, at least, and it looks like in at least a decent number of other countries (United Kingdom, Japan, India, but not Germany or China) you can drive a car with no doors pretty much anywhere you can legally drive a car, and, if you think about it, that’s an incredible thing, worthy of celebration.
I mean, just think about it, especially in the context of modern car safety requirements and standards. We currently live in an era where cars are absolutely crammed full of airbags like how Sam Rothstein wanted blueberries to be crammed into muffins at the Tangiers hotel. Or how cars now beep at you, relentlessly, if seatbelts aren’t fastened for rear seat passengers and they remind you to check the back seat for forgotten children every time you leave and they have automatic braking and rear-view cameras or even 360° cameras and ultrasonic sensors in bumpers and on and on and on. They’re wildly safe in every possible way, thanks to vast arrays of legal requirements. And yet, at the same time, it’s completely legal to drive on any highway like this:
Look at that. That’s what we call freedom, people.
It’s just part of the beautiful madness of how we view safety here in America. We’re kind of all or none when it comes to this stuff. We have incredibly stringent safety requirements and carmakers build remarkably safe cars with doors that have many regulations and restrictions on things like door handles or impact intrusion bars and side curtain air bags or we say, well, if you don’t want all that, how about nothing at all? How does that sound to you? Nothing?
It’s even noted right there in the official Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) Title 49 Subtitle B Chapter V Part 571 Subpart B § 571.214, among a number of other places (emphasis mine):
(c) Exclusions from S9 (vehicle-to-pole test). The following vehicles are excluded from S9 (vehicle-to-pole test) (wholly or in limited part, as set forth below):
(1) Motor homes;
(2) Ambulances and other emergency rescue/medical vehicles (including vehicles with fire-fighting equipment) except police cars;
(3) Vehicles with a lowered floor or raised or modified roof and vehicles that have had the original roof rails removed and not replaced;
(4) Vehicles in which the seat for the driver or any front outboard passenger has been removed and wheelchair restraints installed in place of the seat are excluded from meeting the vehicle-to-pole test at that position; and
(5) Vehicles that have no doors, or exclusively have doors that are designed to be easily attached or removed so that the vehicle can be operated without doors.
That phrasing, talking about vehicles without doors or having “doors that are designed to be easily attached or removed so that the vehicle can be operated without doors,” shows up in a number of places in the FMVSS documents, and gives some clarity to the permission of doorlessness: it’s only for cars that were designed to have removable doors. Just yanking the doors off your grandma’s old Delta 88 isn’t going to cut it.
But if your vehicle was designed with doors that are easy to yank off? Have at it!
Well, almost have at it – there is one thing to consider, and that’s mirrors. Some states require side-view mirrors on both sides of the vehicle, some only require a driver’s side mirror, and some just require an “inside” rear-view mirror. There’s a full breakdown of mirror laws by state here, but essentially it’s like this:
All three mirrors (both sides and inside): Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania
Two mirrors (driver’s side and one other, inside or passenger side): Alaska, California, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming
One driver’s side mirror: Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah
At least one mirror, somewhere: every other state
… so if you can pull that off, you can drive with doorless abandon.
Some vehicles, like the new Ford Bronco, have provisions to mount mirrors on the front cowl below the windshield, where Jeep Wranglers don’t have a straightforward, ready-to-go solution, though there are aftermarket options.
But I’m kind of getting away from my main point here: it’s objectively bonkers – wonderful, yet bonkers – that driving without doors of any kind is still legal. Our culture can seem so safety-obsessed at times that it feels stifling, but then you remember things like this. I mean, I suppose as long as motorcycles exist, this isn’t really all that big a deal, comparatively, but in the automotive space, it does seem like a really novel exception.
In Japan, there are requirements to have some sort of restraining device, like a chain or simple bar like on that Honda Vamos up there, just to keep you from flopping out, but here in America, we don’t even bother with that. Well, I suppose we have seat belt laws, so that likely fulfills the anti-flop role.
Driving without doors feels like an improbable joy; it’s not especially convenient or maybe even pleasant at highway speeds, but for just richarding around town on a summer day? It’s oddly fantastic.
I’m just happy we still have the ability to legally do this; it feels like a privilege that is in constant, if mild, peril of being rescinded, so I think it’s important to take a moment and reflect on doorless driving as a nice little perk of life here on Earth.
That’s all. I just wanted us to take a moment to appreciate this.
Top graphic image: Volkswagen
The post Can We Just Take A Moment To Appreciate That It’s Legal To Drive A Car With No Doors? appeared first on The Autopian.
