Saying farewell to the Toyota FJ Cruiser, the modern beach buggy

In a lineup well-stocked with rational vehicles, the Toyota FJ Cruiser has always been a happy anomaly, a real-life concept car that’s been embraced by more than 200,000 buyers so far. With its clamshell doors, retro-futuristic styling and genuine off-road chops, the FJ catered to the cohort who would’ve bought a new FJ40 Land Cruiser if it were still in production. Nobody needed an FJ Cruiser—the four-door 4Runner is more practical and basically as capable off-road—but the FJ was a fun digression, a genuine Jeep Wrangler alternative for people who actually take their SUVs off-road. I say “was,” because the FJ will bow out after 2014, its sales having dwindled to the point that it got the axe rather than a redesign. However, with the release of the 2014 Trail Teams Ultimate Edition, the FJ is at least going out in style.

Toyota is building 2,500 Ultimate Editions, each wearing Heritage Blue paint and a white grille surround that makes for an obvious evocation of the FJ40 glory days. It’s got some nice hardware, too, with coil-over Bilstein front suspension and remote-reservoir rear shocks, a thick aluminum skid plate, and TRD bead lock wheels with BF Goodrich All-Terrain tires. To send it off, I decided to take the FJ to a place where SUVs still rule and crossovers drool: the beach.

And I don’t mean, “the parking lot next to the beach.” I’m talking about the north end of Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where you’re allowed to drive on the sand and weekends become impromptu 4x4 jamborees, with trucks parked side by side above the high tide line for more than a mile. This is what you think you’d do with an FJ when you buy an FJ. And, as I found out, plenty of FJ owners actually use their trucks for their intended purpose. At Carolina Beach, the Papa John’s delivery guy rolls in an FJ Cruiser.

On the street, car-based crossovers have largely supplanted real-deal SUVs like the FJ. But not on Carolina Beach. Here, with few exceptions, trucks are the standard mode of transportation. And some of them are way overkill, ex-military troop carriers, massively lifted diesel pickups and at least one F-350 that had to be trailered to the beach because its tires were in full monster-truck territory, far from street legal. Plus, as that truck’s owner told me, “It only does about 25 mph, so if I drove it I’d need two days to get here.”

The FJ, while sporting much more reasonable rubber, nevertheless had no problem navigating the sand. In fact, it had traction to spare, as I found while towing out a stuck Jeep Compass, followed by a Subaru XV Crosstrek. The latter was a bit of poetic justice, since last winter I used a Crosstrek to tow a stuck FJ Cruiser that wouldn’t go into four-wheel-drive in a snowstorm. This Subaru’s owner, eyeing the FJ, asked, “Will that be strong enough to pull us out?” I assured him it was, and it did. Didn’t even need low range or the rear differential lock.

Crossovers are great for most people, most of the time. They make sense. But sometimes, you still want an SUV.