The Ford Bronco is returning, and while we’re not sure when we’ll finally see the dang thing, a recent Automotive News story told us that we can expect to buy it in late 2020 -- and gave us a better sense of what we can expect from the vehicle feature-wise.

Or, more accurately, what we can expect from the vehicles, plural, feature-wise. That piece sketched out a whole family of off-road-oriented vehicles discussed at a Ford dealer meeting, including two- and four-door Broncos, a smaller “baby Bronco” and a compact pickup truck. The two-door Bronco was actually shown in prototype form at that meeting. And yes, it is said to have both removable doors and a removable top.

This would make the Bronco the only new SUV, aside from the Jeep Wrangler, in our market to offer these features. But we’re expecting a few differences. For example, the Bronco’s side mirrors reportedly attach to the A-pillars, rather than the doors themselves, so they won’t come off if you decide to go doorless. Two Ford patent applications hint at just how these features could work.

First, the doors. A Ford patent shows doors that can be removed entirely, but you’d also be able to remove just the door skins, leaving hinged bars in place for occupant safety (patent illustrations for this "door with convertible scaffolding" show the door assemblies sliding off the bars like kebabs off skewers). Tubular skeleton doors are available for the Jeep Wrangler, but they’re aftermarket parts; these Ford patents show a way to get the same functionality, in theory, out of just one set. Plus, you’d get most of the fun of the doors-off experience without having to unbolt any hinges.

Second, the roof. This one’s a little more complicated; illustrations show a retractable, dual cloth/mesh screen that sits beneath a removable hardtop (you can check out the patent application for a "soft top of two substances" here). So you’d get the open-air feel with some amount of protection from the sun, and perhaps even light rain. This would give a vehicle like the Bronco a removable top system with enough flexibility to handle quickly changing weather, at least to an extent, without directly copying the quick-folding cloth top of the Wrangler.

Additionally, there are also details on a cloth top that can be pulled out behind the truck and set up as a canopy (think along the lines of a retractable cargo cover, but mounted above the tailgate). This is one of those “whoa, that’s kind of cool!” gizmos you’d expect to see on a concept car.

This transformable soft top, shown in another Ford patent application, turns into a canopy mounted above the tailgate.

There’s a big caveat here: Patents have little to do with what actually makes it to production. All it means is that someone, at some point in the development process for a given vehicle, had an idea novel enough to merit a patent application. That idea might appear on an upcoming Bronco or Bronco variant, it might be dusted off years down the road on a different vehicle entirely ... or it might never be employed in any way.

It’s also worth noting that Ford incentivizes its employees to cultivate ideas for potentially patentable products and inventions. This sometimes results in totally off-the-wall bikes made of car parts or motorcycle-car hybrids, but a lot of the time, it’s for something more mundane but also more production-plausible.

The subjects of these recent patents sit somewhere between the two extremes. They do seem like they could actually be executed on a production vehicle, but we’ve found that, in our experience, features that try to do too many things seldom do any of those things well. A vehicle like the Bronco demands a certain amount of ruggedness, and it’s for good reason that “rugged” is often synonymous with “simple.”

Will a cool retractable roof/canopy mechanism still work after an afternoon at the dunes, what with all the jostling and sand intrusion? How will a transformable door handle repeated exposure to mud? Whether these ideas are more than just novel fodder for Ford’s patent library will hinge on their implementation; we’ll have to wait until the Bronco emerges -- whenever that will be -- to find out which features actually translate to reality.

Thanks to Motor Trend for digging these up and bringing them to our attention.

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