My Mind Is Blown. This Man Cut The Sail Pillars Off A Honda Ridgeline And Welded Them To The Back Of A Jeep Grand Cherokee

I cannot believe what my eyes are seeing right now. This build by Nevada-based Jacob Collis involved cutting off the rear section of a first-gen Jeep Grand Cherokee’s roof and turning it into a pickup truck. But while hacking the roof off a unibody SUV is already a strange and questionable thing to do, the truck-ification of the Jeep isn’t the weird part — what’s weird is that Collis reinforced the unibody by welding on sail pillars from a first-gen Honda Ridgeline. Yes, you read that right.

We’ve seen so many strange build projects here on The Autopian that it really takes something special to get me bang on my keyboard, and this automotive Frankenstein, called by its maker the “Jenda GrandRidgeline Wagoneer,” absolutely qualifies, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense while at the same time making a tiny bit of sense. Hear me out.

A Jeep Grand Cherokee is a unibody vehicle, meaning that, instead of having a separate passenger-holding body bolted to a frame that handles the majority of the chassis loads, there’s just one single body designed to handle it all. Integrating the vehicle’s overall load-bearing structure into the body itself allows for more interior volume, better overall stiffness, weight-savings, and various other advantages. What it also does is make modifications to the body hugely problematic, whereas on a body-on-frame vehicle you could hack the body up all day and let the frame handle the loads.

For the longest time, pretty much all pickup trucks were body-on-frame only, since a roofless truck bed is hard to make stiff; sticking with a strong ladder under the bed to take up the loads just made sense. But then came the Honda Ridgeline, which eschewed the frame for a fully unibody design. How exactly did Honda build a frameless pickup truck that could handle the bending and torsion loads that a truck would see? Well, Honda engineers installed “sail pillars” to each side of the vehicle. That’s these:

If the concept looks familiar, it may be because the newly-released Tesla Cybertruck uses sail pillars to provide sufficient stiffness to handle road/towing loads:

These sail pillars (also called sail panels) are meant to tie the rear of the truck — where the loads come in via the trailer hitch and via the rear suspension — in with the roof, thus creating a larger moment of inertia to resist torsion and bending.

Maybe you can see where this is going. If cutting a unibody Jeep Grand Cherokee’s roof leads to structural concerns, and Honda fixed structural concerns on its unibody truck by incorporating sail pillars, then couldn’t one solve the Jeep’s problems by just installing the Honda’s sail pillars?

This is an absolutely outlandish thought. It doesn’t work like that! Those pillars have to be integrated into the original design, with Finite Element Analysis and all sorts of other simulations/tests done to make sure it all works together as a system, and it has to be welded into the structure just right. You can’t just stitch one truck’s sail pillars into a hacked up SUV and expect it to solve your bending/torsion problems!

Still, maybe it could help a little to tie that rear end together, and the idea of it is just so bafflingly absurd that I cannot help but absolutely love Collis’s build. “The idea originally came from this man out in New Zealand … the man who made [a pickup Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ],” Collis told me over Facebook Messenger. “The problem is, if you look at this truck’s further photos you begin to see … where the piece on the back came from. It’s a fiberglass shell from a boat on the back, with a window panel placement and cutout,” he told me.

“When preparing the cut I took noticed of some of Jeep’s ZJ design features for an anti-taco [i.e. folding] effect. Should the B and C and D pillar ever wind up cut, they’re not compatible with a full fiberglass rear firewall,” he said. “The motor in these is usually a 5.2, and it has enough torque to twist and contort the body, even though it’s a unibody vehicle. And with the rear gone, I lost downward weight displacement in the rear because of the lack of a rear back.” I’m assuming he means that lack of a rear structure made the truck lose rigidity/strength needed to carry/haul loads or to go off-road.

“So to get the truck effect and give it some ability to retain its older safety feats, I gave it a full rear fire wall of an ’07 Honda ridgeline,” he continued.

“With a lil’ cutting and shaping, me and my buddy got the wall in and weld it in nicely without any Bondo.” Collis told me that folks in Reno typically just hack off the back end and leave it looking like a standard regular-cab pickup. “That’s wonky in my eyes at least,” he said. “They do this, or the whole back minus your gas tank goes, then they don’t seal or prime out any of the edges so the whole damn thing rusts after two years of mud bogging.”

 

In a few sentences that were a little hard to understand completely, Collis talked about how hot rods and the Chevy SSR pickup had inspired his build. “I chose the Ridgeline because I love [Ed Roth’s] Rat Fink, and there’s an old Hot Wheels automotive designer that made the Dodge Surf Wagon who helped head the design team for the Chevy SSR truck concept – that yellow beach-looking truck.”

“The angle of the Ridgeline and the forward hood angles on the ZJ … they flow well. While my wife was in labor, I set up some auto as designs between the ZJ and a Chevy avalanche the Subaru Outback Baja the Honda Ridgeline … I was never going to pick this one, but I put it in because most do the Ford Ranger only because of compatibility … the Ridgeline took the prize. I just didn’t want a flat-looking single cab.”

He mentioned that he noticed a lack of stiffness when he just hacked his Jeep up, especially off-road, and that the Ridgeline’s sail pillar actually seemed to have helped. “Anywho, the problem was weight, and I felt like the guy whose Jeep I modeled mine after chose a copout for a quick design fix. And because I’ve driven the Jeep with a back, without a back, and with a new back, I know he’s missing out on hillclimbs. And moderate trails must be a pain in the ass on his, ’cause mine has the abilities his doesn’t.”

“It’s my first truck, given to me by an old friend who I happened to used to steal cars at 18 with. I got out of prison, got my license, and he gave her to me. Her name is Dignus Mjolnir, a mix between Gaelic and Latin that translates to ‘for those who are worthy,'” Collis told me. “We’ve turned into family men now, but when she broke down her fan blade got sent through the radiator, and then the water pump, then out the hood. So I spent a year and a half refusing to let her go.”

“Now she’s the Jenda GrandRidgeline Wagoneer,” Collis concluded. “I say that because I plan to make a couple more, kinda ship of Theseus the idea out a lil’ more. I plan to do an XJ and give it to my wife and name it Minnie-Me … I plan to 5.7 Hemi Magnum-swap the power plant and give it two inches, try and get a wishbone or a pillar suspension axle unit underneath.”

“The plan overall is to get as much publicity at the start, refine the look to a fine point, and hopefully, hell or high water, I get some people to jump on the bandwagon to make this further a reality. Her prototype name is the “MDM 0 – X – 001 Jenda Grand Ridgeline Wagoneer Series developed by MDM motors,” which is a dream company of mine called Modern Day Motors. But she’s a racetrack support truck / prerunner. I wanna enter her into SCORE International event and the DAKAR World Rally by the end of her life.”

This is just madness. Absolute madness. And even though the engineer in me cringes a bit, I still am – for reasons unknown – here for it.