You can think of the Felicia FUN’s innovation as a sort of marriage between two other small-truck funnovations: the foldable mid-gate, as seen on the Chevy Avalanche and Toyota bB Opendeck, and the seats in the truck bed, as seen, famously, on the Subaru BRAT.
Okay, so what’s going on here? Well, the Felicia FUN was, essentially a version of the pickup truck variant of the Škoda Felicia, which was in turn an update of the Škoda Favorit, which was Škoda’s first transverse front engine/front wheel drive car after years and years of Škoda sticking with rear engine/rear wheel drive cars. While I personally adore the rear/rear setup, Škoda realized that the world – especially small European car world – was going FWD, and they were kinda late to the game. So, the Favorit was born, and then developed into the Felicia, which was Škoda’s last indpendent platform to be developed before they became part of the VW Group. One nice thing about small front engine/FWD cars is that they’re pretty easy to adapt into small front engine/FWD pickup trucks, which is exactly what Škoda did, selling it both as a Škoda and rebadged as a VW Caddy. The point of the pickup was to sell to the commercial, workhorse market, but Škoda understood that thing the winter caretaker of the Grand Overlook Hotel made so clear: all work and no play makes Felicia a dull girl. So, with that in mind, a “lifestyle version” (Type 796, if you care) was built, which just means it was something made for fun instead of work, hence the name. So, the Felicia Fun got bright colors and fun upholstery with a pattern that had little crowned frogs, which was the mascot of the truck, a little sketch of a regal frog, likely a firm but fair ruler of his little amphibian kingdom. When the truck was shown at the Geneva Auto Show in 1995, it featured a little “party trick,” as Skoda themselves called it: I think calling them “emergency seats” sounds a little alarmist for their actual use, which was the sort of emergency you might have when you manage to convince two hotties of your preferred gender to hop into your truck. Here’s a little video that shows how these things got deployed:
Look how well that works! The midgate lifts up and back on those hinged rails, grabbed from that big bar, then the seat bottom folds into place, and boom, two more seats! There were even options to add a roof and windows to the back seats:
Škoda built the Felicia FUN from 1995 to 2001, and you could get them with 1.9-liter/64 horsepower diesel, or either a 68hp/1.3-liter or 75 hp/1.6-liter engines, all inline-fours and pretty conventional small European car-type drivetrains. But nobody bought these for their raw power or speed, of course, they bought them because they were both useful and silly, and for some of us out there, a second row of seats that origamis out from the back of a truck cab is just an irresistible draw. I get the appeal. I feel like we haven’t been in an era where we’ve seen much of this unselfconscious frivolity in cars, and that’s a shame, but I do have some hope. I think in our approaching era of widespread EVs, the near-standard skateboard-type chassis and the packaging flexibility that provides may make such fun, odd innovations like this viable again, and perhaps even more than before, since EV drivetrains are generally pretty uniform, making the need for other more aggressive differentiation even more important. I think we’re already seeing this in vehicles like the Rivian, with its Swiss Army-style of storage compartments and slide-out kitchens. I bet we won’t have to wait too long for a rebirth of the midgate and fold-out seats. Take your inspiration from this old Czech, modern EV makers. Because FUN is fun. Like with the Maverick, Ford’s goal was to have a competitively priced product on the market asap, so we end up with an EV based on the current BOF F-150 starting at $40k instead of a $100k+ Hummer-like monstrosity. In Denmark, where private vehicles are quite heavily taxed, we have always had a lot of Skodas everywhere, since they were cheap. So I have actually seen a Felicia Fun myself once! Since it was priced at around 150% of a regular Skoda, they were very rare, and “Skoda” and “fun” were two VERY different things over here., Lada/VAZ’es (in the Fiat 124 form) or Citroën 2CV/Dyane were other cheap alternatives for people in the school teacher income bracket. My dad had a Dyane for the daily 30 mile commute. Midgates are awesome and should be way more common in this era of pickups that are basically family haulers with vestigial beds for cultural signaling purposes. A midgate would make those short little beds so much more useful, without asking any major sacrifices in return. I really think the Maverick especially could have used one. Ford missed an opportunity there. Anyway, midgates forever! Others have similar “miss opportunity” comments about no AWD + Hybrid from the start and no PHEV from the start and so on. Seeing how they’re literally selling all they can build with a months-long waiting list, I don’t think they missed any opportunities here. They obviously came up with a winning formula. I mean, look at what we did get from the start: a $20k 40+ MPG Hybrid crew cab pickup, which can be upgraded to 250 HP + AWD + tow package for the same price every other truck (midsize and Santa Cruz) starts at for an ill-equipped 2wd. I think that’s remarkable, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have done exactly what they did by getting the basic product right, and upgrading it later with the PHEV and/or Hybrid AWD and/or a sporty variant and/or an off-road variant similar to Bronco Sport Badlands and/or with ProPower On Board, etc. I have a non car related question I am hoping someone has an answer for. Why are metric measurements almost always in millimeters, like this, “1,370 to 850 millimetres”? Why not use meters or centimeters? They aren’t talking about anything under a centimeter, so what’s the point of using millimeters? I have never understood that. In daily life we’d say ‘Alice is 170cm tall’ or ‘That car is 10m away’, and rarely use mm unless for very small things. However, it was by far the least reliable vehicle my family has ever owned, so it spent the vast majority of my childhood sitting in the driveway rusting away while waiting to be repaired. I’m guessing my folks didn’t dare take on any kind of journey where luggage would be necessary. Either that or the hood was just rusted shut.
