I’ve only owned one Toyota in my car-owning life, and true to Toyota’s reputation, it remains one of the most reliable and trouble-free cars I’ve ever owned. That Toyota was a Scion xB, a wonderfully boxy little workhorse that has since found a second life as a hilarious rally car. I always felt the incredibly simple two-box design was wonderfully useful and practical. Really, the only thing that could have made the xB any more useful was if it could somehow be a little pickup truck. Because then you could, you know, carry ostriches and cypress trees and tall things like that.
Happily, Toyota actually did have a pickup truck version of the Scion xB (which was known as the Toyota bB in Japan), and it was called the bB Open Deck. We never got it here in the states; in fact, I’m not sure it ever officially made it out of Japan at all.
The clever little bB Open Deck was like a normal bB from the front to the B-pillar. Or, at least where the B-pillar would be, because on one side of the car it was gone, replaced by a combination of nothing and a rear suicide door:
There was still a good-sized back seat area, but now behind it instead of a wagon-like (and tall) cargo area, there was a pretty short open truck bed, flanked by a pair of roll bars/roof rails that suggested the boxy shape of the normal bB.
The bed wasn’t long, but it was usable, and was even more useful than may be initially apparent because this was the only Toyota to ever feature an actual midgate. That’s right! That rear window would flip up like a hatch, and the bulkhead below that would flip down flat on the truck bed to allow for a much longer load area. Look!
See what’s going on there? Also, that tailgate folds flat to increase the bed length as well. With the midgate folded open and the tailgate down, you’ve suddenly got a bed that is approaching normal compact pickup truck bed lengths. What a Swiss Army knife of a car!
It looks like at least one company was turning these into really cool rides for wheelchair users, with special storage solutions for the wheelchair in the bed and a seat that pivots and deploys out of the car door up front.
Here’s a video walkthrough of one acquired by an importer, so you can see it in some detail:
It’s pretty damn cool. I like when a carmaker decides to make a car cooler not via the application of power and performance hardly anyone is really going to take advantage of, but by making something wildly flexible and useful via lots of little doors and flaps and moving panels and whatnot.
The advertising for the bB was pretty much by the book: you know, the usual, expected ways a corporation tries to convince you that you need a particular car, via gold-painted mermen in what looks kind of like Thai-inspired headgear and blowing what I think are bugles as they romp around on their fishy tales and even take naps in the back of the bB OpenDeck:
Yep, the old gold mermen blowing bugles gambit. Way to phone it in, Toyota.
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