Jeep’s New Recon Looks Like A Theft Recovery When The Doors Are Off, But I Can Fix It

It’s disappointing when an automaker includes what should be a cool-looking feature with a new car, but the feature ends up not very cool-looking (or downright awkward) when it arrives. Jeep’s new Recon EV is one of those vehicles with such a flaw, and unfortunately, it happens when you exercise this little SUV’s Jeepiest feature: removable doors.

Recently, Jeep has struggled with lackluster sales on a number of products that, if you took off the grille and badges, could easily have come from almost any manufacturer. That’s why it warmed our hearts last week when David Tracy spoke highly of how the Recon looks in person. The new Recon EV has a tough, functional appearance that’s instantly recognizable as a Jeep and shows great promise for the brand, one of the first Jeep products in a while that excited most of the staff when we first saw photos. The fact that it looks less than spectacular with the doors off is a bit of a turd in the punchbowl.

However … for limited effort and cash, Jeep could make the doors-off Recon look just as good as you’d hope it would. I’ll explain.

Real Off-Roaders Have Four Driven Wheels And No Doors

One of the “Jeep Things” that owners correctly claim most don’t understand is the appeal of ditching the doors for the ultimate in open-air motoring. It’s part of the DNA of every Wrangler or Jeep CJ from years past, like on this old YJ:

It’s a trick that the original Bronco could do as well, albeit with inserts in place of the larger steel doors to create a smaller opening for a soft door:

Even the old International Harvester Scout had a similar option with rather incongruous plastic inserts that, unlike the Bronco’s solution, didn’t even match the rest of the vehicle:

Being able to remove the doors is a mandatory touchstone for your SUV to say, “yes, I’m a serious off-road machine,” even if this thing isn’t ever going to leave the pavement. That’s very often the case today with the current descendants of these legends and their suburbanite owners.

One of the biggest things during the summer around my very non-rural parts in rare, good weather is people with Jeep Wranglers or newer Broncos spending half an hour or so carefully unbolting and storing their side doors on a Saturday morning, only to have to waste that same time reinstalling these heavy panels later that day.

I can maybe understand doing this if you’re going to be navigating Moab or some Appalachian backwoods trail, but for driving to Chipotle, I’m not as convinced that the juice is worth the squeeze. Maybe to those who do it find the thrill of riding around like you’re in a giant side-by-side is appealing, or they simply just think it looks cool.

Personally, I’d rather spend half a second pushing four buttons to lower the windows and raise them in the same amount of time to be able to lock the thing when I park it (ask Jason about the costly baby seat he had stolen out of his press loaner Wrangler). This looks like a serious waste of time:

But a trend is a trend, so it’s fun to see that Jeep has added this removable door feature to the new all-electric Recon.

You can even remove the rear quarter and hatch glass as well if you want to be “full open” and waste even more of your precious, valuable time off taking your car apart. However, there seems to be a slight visual problem when going doorless in the Reccon.

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

It’s entirely possible, if not advisable, to remove the doors from virtually any car and drive it around. At least with the Wrangler and Bronco, not only was the process for this removal thought out to make it relatively simple and reversible, but it appears that the aesthetics of the whole thing was taken into consideration as well.

The Wrangler is such a functional piece that it looks great without the doors in place, helped in large degree by the fact that the four-door models don’t have pillars behind the rear doors.

On the Bronco, the black upper “B” pillars help to tie the look together. It has an actual pillar behind the rear doors, but it visually disappears.

Not so with the Recon. Looking at images online, a door-free Recon looks like it’s in a collision center waiting for the new doors to come back from paint. When I first saw the pictures of the green one at the Auto Show with a spokesperson standing in front of it, I thought it might be a demonstration “cutaway” version to show the press the construction. The effect is especially bad on lighter colored models like below:

I half expected the “Fiero Triplets” from the 1984 show circuit to pop out and reinstall the doors during the presentation.

A lot of Recon buyers won’t care (especially those who will never take the doors off), but I think the whole ruse of turning your family car into something that appears to be a Polaris Ranger with a few wrench turns is lost since the doorless Recon ends up looking more like an unfinished SUV. The good news is I think it could be fixed for very little money.

Let’s Blow The Doors Off This Thing

To get the look I think we want, we can take another look at that benchmark Polaris for a moment:

Note that the body panels painted in a color sit at the front and rear quarters, while black abounds over the rest of the structure, including around the removable doors. To emulate this look, our Recon will need to do the same thing. Here’s a grey one as it appears in the press photo:

Now the same vehicle with the door jambs blacked out:

Here’s an animation between the two:

It’s even more dramatic on this green example from the show:

Blacked out, the whole “side by side” look really starts to work. It almost appears to be side-by-side now; an intentional thing and not like you opened your doors onto traffic and had a semi knock them off like in Smokey and the Bandit:

Again, an animation between the body-colored door jams and the black finish:

How could this be done? Well, the jam areas could of course be painted, though two-tone painting anything adds cost and complexity. It would have been great if Jeep had designed the Recon so the entire understructure could be painted black with the various body panels providing the car’s color – but as it stands, that’s probably not an option.

Another idea might be an “open air trim” kit that would include molded trim pieces to cover up the body-colored door openings, including sill plates at the bottom with molded-in JEEP or RECON logos and lettering. Whether paint or plastic, the doorless look with these minor alterations makes the Recon as cool in open-air mode as Jeep intended.

I Still Rather Just Roll The Windows Down

The Recon EV is a great-looking little SUV, and the minimal changes I’ve proposed seem to let this door-free SUV really do a good job of pretending to be a side-by-side. Rather than making onlookers wonder if a doorless Recon had its doors stolen, these spectators might envy the open-air fun the driver and passengers are having in their stylishly, intentionally door-free Jeep.

I, however, would not be envious. Do you really want to see my pasty white legs? Unless I wake up tomorrow looking like a tanned God, I’ll keep my doors on, thank you very much.

Top graphic image: Stellantis