Most SUVs tuck their spare tire out of sight, welded under the floor or bolted beneath the cargo bay where it never touches the elements. A few nameplates instead bolt the wheel straight to a rear door, using it as reinforcement, a design cue, and a space saver all at once. Here are twelve vehicles that carry a spare wheel mounted on the outside of the body.
1. Jeep Wrangler: Reinforced Tailgate By Design
Jeep hangs the spare wheel on the Wrangler’s swing-out rear tailgate, a placement common enough that Mopar sells a tailgate reinforcement kit built specifically to handle the wheel’s added weight and leverage on that hinge.
The bracket keeps the spare visible and easy to reach on the trail, but it also adds sustained stress to the door itself, which is exactly why Jeep’s own parts catalog treats reinforcement as a factory-documented fix rather than an aftermarket afterthought.
2. Toyota FJ Cruiser: A Full-Size Spare, Rear-Mounted
Toyota built the FJ Cruiser with a full-size spare wheel bolted to the swing-out rear door rather than tucked beneath the cargo floor, a detail the automaker’s own press materials listed as standard equipment across the model’s run.
Mounting the spare there forced engineers to offset the license plate and taillight housing to clear the wheel, a compromise the boxy SUV accepted in exchange for a full-size tire that never ate into interior cargo space.
3. Mercedes-Benz G-Class: Bolted To The Rear Door
Mercedes-Benz documents the G-Class spare wheel bracket directly in its owner’s manual, describing the mount bolted to the rear-end door rather than hidden under the load floor like most modern SUVs.
That placement has stayed part of the G-Class silhouette across decades of generational updates, a mechanical holdover from the vehicle’s military origins that Mercedes never engineered away even as the rest of the SUV grew steadily more luxurious, more powerful, and considerably more expensive inside.
4. Suzuki Jimny: Full-Size Spare, Every Trim
Suzuki mounts a full-size spare tire to the Jimny’s tailgate across the entire model range, a design detail reporting on the current generation notes has carried over unchanged through the SUV’s various redesigns.
Keeping the tire tailgate-mounted preserves cargo room in a genuinely small vehicle, though it also means the rear door swings open carrying extra weight every single time a driver reaches for groceries, camping gear, or anything else stashed behind the rear seats.
5. Land Rover Defender: The Tailgate-Mounted Signature
Land Rover hangs the spare wheel on the Defender’s side-opening rear tailgate, a layout coverage of the current model calls one of the shape’s defining visual signatures going back to the original.
The side-hinged door swings wide to reveal the full cargo area, but it also means opening the tailgate in a tight parking spot requires swinging a wheel’s worth of extra clearance out into traffic behind the vehicle, a tradeoff owners accept for the extra storage room.
6. Toyota RAV4 (first generation): Original Compact SUV, Exposed Wheel
The original XA10-generation RAV4 wore its spare wheel in a hard plastic cover mounted to the side-hinged rear door, a detail the first-generation model’s entry confirms carried through its entire production run.
That exterior-mount styling disappeared once Toyota widened the RAV4 into a larger, more conventional family SUV, making the compact original one of the few RAV4 generations that ever wore its spare wheel outside the body rather than beneath the cargo floor.
7. Honda CR-V (first generation): The Picnic-Table Original
The first-generation CR-V hung its spare wheel on the tailgate under a removable cover, a layout the nameplate’s history ties to the same generation that famously built a fold-out picnic table into its cargo floor.
Honda dropped both quirks once the CR-V grew into a mainstream crossover aimed at a much wider audience, so the tailgate-mounted spare survives today mainly as a first-generation detail that later, smoother-bodied versions of the SUV never brought back.
8. Hummer H3: Swing-Gate Spare, Hard Cover Included
GM built the Hummer H3 with a full-size spare mounted to the rear swing gate under a hard cover, a configuration the model’s spec history lists among the SUV’s standard off-road equipment.
The setup mirrored the exterior-spare tradition of the larger Hummer H1 and H2, scaled down onto a smaller mid-size platform, keeping a full-size tire within easy reach on the trail without ever sacrificing cargo area beneath the load floor of the truck.
9. Mitsubishi Pajero: Side-Hinged Door, Wheel Outside
Mitsubishi’s Pajero carries its spare wheel under a hard plastic cover bolted to the side-hinged rear door, a layout the model line’s history notes stayed consistent across most of the SUV’s global generations.
Markets that sold the same vehicle badged as the Montero or the Shogun kept that same door-mounted spare wheel intact, a shared mechanical trait that outlasted every nameplate change Mitsubishi made across different regions and different decades of production.
10. Suzuki Vitara (first generation): Colour-Matched Cover, Rear Door
The original Suzuki Vitara mounted its spare wheel to the rear door with a cover often painted to match the body, a detail the first-generation model’s history ties to the same compact SUV sold elsewhere as the Sidekick and Escudo.
That painted cover turned a purely functional wheel mount into a small styling touch, light enough that the compact SUV could still carry it on the door hinge without the rear end feeling overloaded or unbalanced.
11. Kia Sportage (first generation): A Hard Shell Over The Spare
The first Kia Sportage carried its spare wheel on a side-opening tailgate under a hard shell cover, a layout the original model’s history notes was standard equipment before Kia redesigned the SUV entirely.
Kia moved the spare wheel inside the body on every later Sportage generation, making the boxy original one of the only versions of the nameplate ever built to wear its wheel on the outside of the vehicle.
12. Isuzu Trooper: Outside The Cargo Bay By Design
Isuzu hung the Trooper’s spare wheel on its side-hinged rear door, keeping the tire outside the cargo bay rather than under the floor, a detail the model line’s production history lists among the SUV’s standard off-road features.
The placement freed up interior space in a genuinely boxy, body-on-frame SUV, a tradeoff Isuzu carried through most of the Trooper’s long production run before the nameplate was finally discontinued in the mid-2000s.
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