Hyundai Wants In On The Midgate Revival With This Clever Pickup Patent

Patent filings are often our first glimpse of new features or, occasionally, entire new models. One such filing by Hyundai is titled "Water Drainage Structure of Vehicle Midgate," which seems pretty boring until you realize that Hyundai doesn't currently build a vehicle with a midgate. This may be a feature intended for Hyundai's upcoming midsize pickup, or possibly a next-generation Santa Cruz to make better use of its tiny truck bed.

A midgate is a handy feature we first saw on the Chevy Avalanche. It extended the truck's 5.25-foot bed into the cabin after stowing the rear seats. This provided an eight-foot-long bed, equal to a true long-bed pickup, when needed, and also a usable back seat when the extra length wasn't needed. It was a neat idea that spread to the Avalanche's platform mate, the weird Cadillac Escalade EXT, about which Car And Driver once wrote, "There are lots of things on which you could spend $49,990. This is one of them." The Hummer H2 SUT also got a midgate, as well as the Subaru Baja. In their cases, it was really only there to try to make their useless short beds just a little bit less unusable, and it didn't really work.

However, with a midgate in Hummer's relatively short lineage, there was a precedent to bring it back in the modern GMC Hummer EV. That almost happened. Early designs included a midgate just like its H2 SUT predecessor, which would have given its five-foot bed some added functionality. However, unlike 20 years ago when the Avalanche roamed the streets, a smaller five-foot bed is now the industry standard, so they decided to skip the midgate and have a retractable back window instead.

One of the few disadvantages of the midgate is that the portion of the bed that extends into the cabin still has a roof over it, limiting the height of anything you want to carry in there. GM already has a solution for this, a retractable roof over the inner bed area from the GMC Envoy XUV. This unusual version of the Envoy tried to turn the rear cargo area into a tiny truck bed with this retractable roof, a third-row seat that folded up into a front bulkhead, and a rear window that slid down into the tailgate, just like a 1971 Ford Country Squire station wagon. The Envoy XUV and Avalanche were built at the same time in the early 2000s, so I'm not sure why GM never thought to put these two ideas together. Honda did, in its own way, according to a patent filing that Car And Driver found. Perhaps Hyundai can find a unique way to add a retractable roof to the midgate on its new truck to give us something GM never did.

While we're at it, here are some other ideas for Hyundai to consider. The Jeep Gladiator is the only convertible pickup truck out there right now, although Ford considered and patented one. That may be a market Hyundai could tap into. In fact, a removable hardtop would be an easy way to open up the back seat area for cargo with the midgate down without all that sliding roof electronic trickery. Ford also holds a patent for "selectively actuated magnetic floor segments" in the bed. These could replace tie-downs, but I'm also thinking of a magnetic motorcycle wheel chock or two that could be placed in the bed, electromagnetized into place, then released and removed when not in use.

How about a bedwetter? Toyota patented a sprinkler system intended to wash your truck bed without going to the car wash. Or, you could fill the bed with dirt, reduce the water pressure into more of a sprinkler system, put an opaque cap on the bed, add some grow lights, and grow... well, whatever you want in your mobile grow lab. Okay, maybe I've been playing a little too much Schedule I lately.