Toyota Turned A Celica Into A Speedboat-Inspired Pickup Truck With A Rumble Seat And Then Did It Again More Than 20 Years Later

Rumor of a forthcoming Toyota Celica had turned into one of the great anticipations of the car world. From gratuitous mention by executives to a suspiciously coupe-shaped rally prototype, it seems like an all-wheel-drive coupe revival might actually be happening at Toyota. At the same time, murmurs of a Toyota compact pickup truck have been bubbling for years, pretty much ever since Ford launched the Maverick. Both would be great to see made real, but it’s easy to forget that before the turn of the millennium, Toyota stuck both ideas in a concept car Cuisinart and set it to puree.

Picture this: It’s the 1999 Tokyo Motor Show and the floor is bustling. Bugatti unveiled the EB 18/4, the first concept for what would eventually become the Veyron. Marc Newson’s Ford 021C concept car is making studious waves. Oh, and then there was the Honda Sprocket with its billionaire doors and tiny pickup bed. At the same time, Toyota had just released the seventh-generation Celica and was looking to go to town with a truly wild concept car variant that looked deep into the back-catalog while capturing the extreme zeitgeist of the Y2K era.

I mean, just look at what was going on in the cultural landscape at the time. Boy bands, sure, but also nu-metal, D-Generation X, and all manner of extreme sports. Jet-skiing, wakeboarding, surfing? Absolutely. Put a pin in that thought. See, 22 years prior to the 1999 Tokyo Motor Show in the same general location, Toyota unveiled something called the CAL-1, a Celica Supra with an added dose of yacht rock.

You can essentially think of the CAL-1 as a pickup truck, except it was proposed as a lifestyle vehicle instead of a workhorse. A shallow teak-lined bed quickly converted into an outdoor passenger area thanks to a deployable rumble seat, or into a more usable cargo hauler by removing both rear deck sections. Wit the wood and the grab rails, the whole machine was rather reminiscent of pleasurecraft. There was even a little fold-out wind deflector to mitigate the risk of firing mayflies directly into rear-seaters’ eyeballs. As Toyota wrote, “The quick transformation of the rear section into a deck reminiscent of a pickup truck or a cruiser with rumble seats delighted the visitors.” I have no reason to doubt Toyota’s PR bumf here, because that wood decking with deployable rumble seats sure is delightful.

However, while the CAL-1 captured the spirit of ’70s pleasure speedboating, it lacked a certain Jägerbomb-factor required to resonate with younger audiences. The sort of people who’d be into a peaky twin-cam inline-four revving past 8,000 RPM. Toyota had the idea, it just needed to get wilder on a more modern execution for 1999. Guess what? It nailed it.

The first thing you notice about the Toyota Celica Cruising Deck concept is that it’s painted an exceptionally bold shade of yellow and sitting on a brash, chromed set of multi-piece wheels. It was the style of the time, and in my eyes, it still rules. Beyond that, the roofline’s been lopped-off behind the front doors, with rakish sail panels flowing down before an enormous wing reaches for the sky out back. Yep, this Celica’s been ute-ized, but that wing isn’t just there for show.

See, the Celica Cruising Deck has three different configurations. It starts off as a pickup truck with a side-hinged rear gate and a partition between the bed and the cabin, but that partition sort-of works like the midgate in a modern Chevrolet Silverado EV. The rear window rolls down into the bottom half of the partition, then the whole assembly folds forward so that outdoorsy auto show models can stick their surfboards in the back.

However, that doesn’t help when you need to bring more than one friend along, so Toyota thought of that. You know that big wing? It actually houses the headrests for the rear rumble seat, which deploys from the deck of the bed after folding the partition backwards and comes upholstered in a vibrantly blue material. Come to think of it, the whole cabin features Gatorade-blue accents from the horn pad to the climate control vents. Talk about the style of the time. Anyway, the roof-mounted bug deflector of the old Celica CAL-1 makes a reappearance, and the whole arrangement looks far comfier than the plastic jump seats of a Subaru BRAT. Even the grab bars are mounted further outboard and should be slightly more ergonomic.

Oh, and if that whole wing seems vaguely reminiscent of a wakeboard tower on a modern speedboat, that’s not an accident. The Celica Cruising Deck came with a party in tow, courtesy of a personal watercraft on a matching yellow trailer. From the upswept character lines ahead of the matching chrome wheels to what appear to be Celica taillights, this is a rad setup. It’s also probably maxing out what’s appropriate for the car, seeing as how a Celica with the high-output 2ZZ-GE engine (187 horsepower in this concept, 180 horsepower in U.S.-spec production models) only had a towing capacity of 2,000 pounds.

Still, it’s wild that Toyota built speedboat-inspired Celica-based utes twice, which begs the question: Could it happen a third time? If the Celica is indeed making a comeback, an updated version of the Cruising Deck concept would only be appropriate. Imagine a modern, all-wheel-drive Celica concept that someone could haul car parts in without dirtying up any cargo area carpet. Come on, Toyota. You know you want to.

Top graphic images: Toyota