First Impressions:
Once the top goes down, the FJ Cruiser becomes the best four-wheel-drive beach transportation money can buy.
Toyota does have a sense of humor. All it takes to see it is a look at the 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser, a cartoon version of the old FJ40 Land Cruiser. It makes your daily commute feel like a trip to the beach.
Until, that is, the FJ Cruiser's double-wide C-pillar blots out your ability to make a quick lane change during the crush-hour traffic. There must be some kind of comic irony to be found in a retro vehicle with severely impaired rearward vision.
Someone should do something about this. In fact, why not just cut off the whole top altogether?
Is Placentia Anywhere Near Newport Beach?
Apparently someone at Toyota had similar thoughts, because last year the company commissioned a convertible concept for the SEMA show from Al Zadeh of Newport Convertible Engineering in Placentia, California. Actually, Zadeh did much better than just slice off the FJ's roof; he went ahead and built a power-operated fabric top to replace it.
This is not the first time an automaker has come to Zadeh to produce a convertible version of one of its vehicles. The FJ represents only a small portion of the alphabet soup of vehicle tops he has engineered during his 24 years in business.
"I have done just about every vehicle from A to Z," he says, only half joking. Under the letter "A" you will find conversions of the Aston Martin Vanquish for individual customers. He handled the design and engineering of the first convertible version of the Volkswagen New Beetle in 1998. Soon after, he worked on the PT Cruiser for Chrysler. His conversion of the 1990-'99 Mercedes-Benz S-Class is still popular with customers in Dubai. Recently, he's been meeting a big demand for ragtop versions of the Cadillac CTS and Chrysler 300C. And don't forget his Nissan Z, which was popular in Japan through the 1980s.
For all Zadeh's popular successes with convertible versions of exotic modern cars, he got the inspiration for his vocation from an MGB while a student at USC.
"I got tired of carrying towels and having wet pants every time I drove my MG in the rain or the car wash," Zadeh recalls. "I started thinking about how I could improve the design of the convertible top."
When work in the oil business began to disappear in 1981, Zadeh changed his engineering career and began to build convertible versions of the Nissan 300ZX, Porsche 928 and even Roll-Royce sedans.
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Zadeh relies on a combination of sketches, computer design and Photoshop-altered images to carry out his development.
"My knowledge base is strong because of all the cars I've done over the years," he explains. "I respect the manufacturer's original design and try not to deviate from it. Safety is most important, so the mounting points for the seatbelts and backseat points stay in place."
Zadeh personally carries out the initial conversion to get a feel for the way the car is built and where it needs structural reinforcement. He says that a four-door vehicle usually takes up to three or four months to design.
The four-door Toyota FJ Cruiser posed an additional problem because its unique B-pillar swings out to afford access to the rear seat, so once the top is removed, the upper latch points for the front seatbelts go with it. As a solution, Zadeh has fabricated a roll cage of 1.25-inch tubing over the passenger area to locate the door mount, plus he's added structural integrity, safety and a dash of Hummer-like off-road machismo.
What Zadeh didn't add was a lot of weight. "I try to keep the weight within 50-100 pounds of the original vehicle," he declares. His FJ convertible weighs about 80 pounds more than a stock version.
Because the FJ has body-on-frame construction, there was no need to further stiffen the chassis. The body, however, gets additional bracing at the rear via extensions from the side of the roll cage, a rectangular bar just forward of the rear wheelwells and two similarly sized bars across the back near the tailgate.
The fully lined power top includes a heated glass rear window. A switch on the lower left of the dash raises and lowers it. Securing it to the windshield is easily done by a pair of latches borrowed from the Toyota Solara convertible.
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