Why no convertible minivans?

by philg

All of the convertibles on the market are 2-seat or 4-seat (except for some Jeeps? but those aren’t cars per se), which means that there should be a wide open field for a company that makes a convertible big enough for a full-size family (though perhaps not for Amy Coney Barrett and her seven kids!).

How about turning an 8-seat minivan into a 7-seat convertible? Borrow some of the space in the last row for the convertible mechanism and then the entire family can enjoy the breeze.

How tough would this be? Maybe it would need to have some framing structure still on the top to accommodate the sliding doors? But what if the entire roof came off and the windows rolled down, leaving essentially just a roll cage?

18 thoughts on “Why no convertible minivans?”

  2. Nissan tried something like a convertible SUV a while back… version of the Murano. Was a big flop, I believe. There may be a Range Rover SUV convertible.

  3. Wouldn’t it become a bit breezy, in the rear? I think the main reason why convertibles are predominantly two-seat is that you need the protection of the windshield. For wind, and insects.

  4. It would have to be very heavy. In building a convertible, you’re going from a box girder to a U girder. Car roofs are stressed components in unibody vehicles, so you’d have to redesign the floor to take more of the stress, or beef up all the roll cage you describe to very high limits.

    Here is how the Odyssey frame is setup.
    https://www.boronextrication.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2017/05/2018-Honda-Odyssey-Extrication-body-structure-vehicle.png

    If you delete the cross members on the roof, a frontal impact could easily lead to the whole vehicle folding on itself upwards. A side impact would also lead to massive deformation, with intrusions into the cabin.

    Of course you could leave them in, but I’m sure the roof take or beef up the longitudinal members (they would probably have to be something like a tubular hollow section), and heavily reinforce the corners, but then you’d have a top heavy vehicle subject to roll over, and other undesirable road handling characteristics. Maybe if they designed a hybrid variant with heavy batteries at the bottom it could cancel out, but it would still add a ton of weight, probably literally.

    So it wouldn’t be a simple conversion of an existing vehicle, but a whole new vehicle. The back rows would also get a lot of wind as others pointed out, which would limit demand, and makes it unattractive for makers.

  6. I doubt there’s much of a market for convertible minivans; people seem to buy convertibles specifically to signal certain things about themselves, and “regularly needs to haul around a basketball team’s worth of dependents” isn’t one of them.

  7. I was going to give the same reasoning as @Andrea gave in #4. But in addition to the safety issues, you have to also figure out how and where to put that roof when you convert the minivan into a convertible. Rolling / folding it away into some sort of trunk in the back will take a lot of space (far more than 1 seat). Telling the owner to remove it and put it back on will be difficult task due to the size and weight. Keep in mind, the majority of (all?) convertibles are small cars.

  9. Could you imagine the water leaks and the noise of a soft top that big or the weight of an automatically retractable hard top? I think we’ve pretty much killed the idea of a minivan convertible.

  10. My first thought was about all the crap in the back of a family vehicle that would blow out with the top down. On second thought, this is genius.

  12. Last year, my car, a sedan, was rear ended. My girls were 6 and 9 at the time, and they both had been asking us to get a minivan like all our friends have. I took it to the auto body shop, and the loaner they had available was a Fiat 500c convertible. I brought that home, we went for a drive, and that was my 6-year old’s first comment: “Do they make convertible minivans?”

  13. Can you imagine all the trouble a six year can cause with no roof to stop her from falling out or thowing stuff? Or pushing her brother out? Or throwing his stuff?

  14. But for adults they modify four door Jeep Wrangler to make them tour Jeep’s with three rows and a nice roll cage. See AZ tours

  15. Around AZ there are hundreds of special jeeps that have been customized to hold three rows and a big roll cage for open top tours. They hold seven passengers plus a driver.

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