Why the 2024 Toyota Tacoma Ditched the Extended Cab Suicide Doors

The 2024 Toyota Tacoma is gaining a lot of options over the current truck, but it’s also losing something: the reverse-opening back doors on extended cab models. In fact, the extended cab—or Access Cab in Toyota parlance—has been replaced by a two-door that’s kind of in between a traditional extended cab configuration and a classic single cab. Around a campfire at Overland Expo, Toyota’s people talked a bit about why.

Tacoma Chief Engineer Sheldon Brown recounted the development days of the new Taco we’re now all familiar with. “In 2019 is when we’re really getting after it, and we’re pulling it together, thinking ‘What is this truck going to be, what are the dimensions, how does that fit, what’s the package, the business case, the technical, high-level standards' … just to frame the timeframe. …and here are … competitors back in the segment [return of the Ford Ranger], we’re seeing new entries into the segment [enter Rivian R1T] … the [midsize truck] segment isn’t shrinking, it’s growing. But all that growth is happening in what we call the Double Cab; the four-door version.”

Brown added a little more casual context I’ll paraphrase. Between 2017 and 2022, extended-cab mid-sized trucks were selling at about 100,000 units a year, of which Toyota had about 34 percent market share. Again, this is napkin math, but probably close coming from the Tacoma’s chief engineer. More significantly, he followed up by saying:

“We looked a little deeper and we saw that 50% of that 34,000 units, people are ordering rear-seat deletes. People aren’t carrying people, they’re carrying things. Stuff. Gear. So we said ‘Hmm, is there a better way to do this?’ Because to be perfectly candid, as we continue to look at side-impact and crashworthiness, it requires a lot to put the suicide doors in. We have to put in a lot of investment and we saw that market shrinking.

“So we thought ‘How can we rethink this? We still want to have an alternative’ (to a full four-door).”

Brown basically confirmed what most industry observers would guess—the automaker didn’t want to build variants of the truck it couldn’t make a lot of money on. And four-door, short-bed trucks are what move quickly off dealer lots. In revisiting my notes from the presentation, I’m realizing there was no mention whatsoever of a true, short single cab being on the table at all, which is kind of funny albeit unsurprising.