FJ Cruiser's Suicide Doors Are Well Named

Depends who's sitting in the front seat.

I'm with bilt9. These doors work exactly as the extended cab doors do on most trucks. That means that the front seat passenger should be closing both the rear and front doors (they have to wait for there rear door to close anyway, because of the overlapping design!). ;o)

Suicide doors prove once again to be a lot like comunism.
 
Great on paper horrible in practice.
 
This alone with the suicide door dance described in another post has lost my faith in them.
 
-Spargo

Would you prefer it to be a 2 door? The idea of the sucide doors is to allow easier entry to the rear while still maintaining the advantage of the 2 door design. TLC styling on the FJ, coupe styling on the Saturn coupe, a shorter length ( or longer bed) then a crew cab on pickups, etc.
 
It's not meant to be a family wagon or minivan. It's meant to be a 2 door that people bigger then a 5 year can enter easily.

What is the advantage of a 2 door design for a truck that has rear seats?

What I meant by that is you can take a 2 door extended cab pickup and give it access to the small rear seats without having to stretch the cab.
 
 If you look at the crew cab pickups on the market, they either keep the same wheelbase and shink the bed or they stretch the wheelbase and end up with a longer, heavier and harder to park pick- up. If you don't need a big back seat then the half doors allow you to have the best of both.

I vote for sliding rear doors on extended cab trucks. Done properly they should still look nearly identical when closed and allow just as much ease-of-access to the back seats in these trucks. And they wouldn't really require lengthening the cab.
 
Actually, I think this would be a good thing on way more than just extended cab truck and minivans.. no more parking dings!

The FJ has two disadvantages in its suicide door design in my opinion. First, there are no grab handles for the rear passengers; they have to grip the front seats for leverage. Second, unlike many trucks that have similar designs, the rear doors do not expose the rear seats fully. You need to slide backwards behind the front seats into the rear seats as opposed to stepping into them. It makes getting into the rear seats very awkward. Because the compact nature of the FJ's design, I don't know if it's possible to change, but the addition of grab handles would improve its usability. A good example of a swing door design that fully exposes the rear seats would be the Nissan Titan.

Um, maybe it's just me, but why don't you tell your wife that next time she can't close the door to grab the DOOR HANDLE?!?! Are you absolutely kidding me, or what? There is a compartment (drink holder) with a ledge right in front of her face!!