1999 Toyota Open Deck - AllCarIndex

Original name: トヨタ オープンデッキ

- Flat utility deck and foldable seats produce open room space

- Double-hinged passenger-side access doors

- Easy-to-load and economical to run

- Usage limited only by the imagination

The new Open Deck is all about freedom and utility. Double-hinged passenger-side doors open outwards to give you wide access to this boxy compact. An open deck at the rear can be extended in either direction by lowering the tailgate and flattening the seats, creating a large, flat open space that you can put to any number of uses. The seats can be arranged in different ways. And it’s economical to run.

It’s a vehicle on which you can stamp your own individuality and ingenuity. Around town, at the beach, or out in the country—wherever you go, and whatever you decide to do, the Open Deck gives you complete freedom of expression.

Open the Box

When driving around, the Open Deck looks like a tall, boxy compact. In the rear, in place of a trunk, is a flat space bounded by a tailgate. This serves as a kind of handy truck bed when the vehicle is fully closed up.

Stop the vehicle and start opening it up, however, and you have a new, wide range of possibilities. On the driver’s side, a single door opens conventionally. But, on the passenger side, there is a rear access door hinged to open up in the opposite direction to the front passenger door. This double-hinged pair of doors give you complete access to the vehicle on the passenger side.

The Open Deck ‘box’ also opens up at the back. Behind the rear row of seats is a separator door with a tinted-glass hatch window. The window opens up and out to extend the roof, while the partition folds down into the truck bed to create a completely flat deck to the outside behind the seats.

The fun does not end there, though. You can now extend the flat space in two directions. First, you can fold one or both sets of seats down to extend it internally. Second, you can lower the rear tailgate to extend the deck further at the back. Clever design means that the space created is completely flat, so it can function as a base for whatever you want to do. In effect, it is a private utility room on wheels that you can drive around. Add some cushions, or perhaps a table and some books. Piece together some utility bars to hold your clothes like a closet, or your books like a bookshelf. Anything is possible with the Open Deck!

Possible applications:

- Base for outdoor sports and activities

- Space for hanging out with friends

- In-car gardening

- Outdoor base camp

- Mobile office

Playing with the Seats

With its two rows of seats, the Open Deck can comfortably seat four adults, and has a seating capacity of five. Various seating arrangements are possible, depending on how you want to use the internal space. For instance, you can collapse the front two seats to use them as a table while you sit in the back—making the Open Deck ideal as a quickly assembled mobile office. Or you can collapse just the back seats to create an inner space out of the rain. The central lower portion of the rear seats can also be lowered to create an armrest.

Load-free Loading

When lowered, the tailgate creates a stable platform for loading either the inside of the vehicle, or for loading goods onto a roof rack.

The wide-access doors on the passenger side make it particularly simple to load lengthy items such as surfboards into the vehicle.

The Open Deck is also easy to maintain. The floor portions of the external open deck are all fully washable, so wet clothes or wetsuits won’t cause any problems. Alternatively, you could use this area as a space for hauling garden supplies and still be able to wash it down.

Powertrain

The Open Deck is front-wheel drive, and features a 1.5-liter engine.

The 4-speed automatic transmission is operated by a column-shift gear lever. This and the foot-operated side parking brake, rather than a hand-brake, help ensure that you can move easily between the driver’s and front passenger seats. This freedom lies at the heart of the Open Deck concept.

SOURCE: Toyota