The pickup truck is pretty much the default car for millions of Americans. Pickup trucks are work vehicles, family cars, luxury cars, hot rods, tuners, and so much more. Today’s trucks can pull down mountains and still get 20 mpg. But you know what sucks? How high modern truck bed heights are!
Every time I test a truck, I try to see how easily I could get a box into the bed. Most of the time, bedsides come pretty darn close to my shoulders while the floor can be more or less stomach level. It’s not great for using a truck as a truck. Who wants to lift a generator or a motorcycle so high off of the ground? Today, David wrote about going car-spotting and what was really cool was seeing old trucks with low bed heights. A. Barth said it best:
…mini trucks still abound, and are often used for hard labor…
Three words, my friend: Low. Load. Height.
I shall continue to beat that LLH drum until manufacturers get back to sensible bed heights or until I find a decent Mazda B-series.
Technically, today’s top COTD nomination goes to a comment responding to Jason’s Cold Start about an imaginary Ford V10 van-truck that would have been the worst possible competitor to the Dodge Viper. Isis asks:
Am I the only person who had to google “onanism”?
I don’t hate manual transmissions kept the bit going:
Beats me.
Yeah, I’m not even sure what I would have used for a COTD topshot for that one! Also, I love that this is becoming a thing. Data:
Body roll must have been awful.
StillNotATony:
Needs some stiff gummipuffers.
There we go! Have a great evening, everyone.
(Topshot: Gates Toyota (vehicle sold, sorry guys.))
A low load height is one of the many items that prompted me to buy my 1990 Jeep Comanche. I can reach over the bed side anywhere and reach most of the load floor without much effort. It has plenty of ground clearance too for the sort of off road work I do occasionally do with it.
Dropside pickups with low bed heights not being available here, I’m sticking’ with my Transit Connect!
1987 Toyota Truck. Bed hits right around my knees. Perfect.
I’ve compromised on the bed height situation. I have a Gladiator and the overall bed height is short enough that my 5 foot 9 inch body can easily touch the bed floor while leaving my feet flat on the ground. It’s also a Rubicon on 35s. I feel like the tradeoff of lift over height for off road capability is easily worth it. Most of the time, whatever I’m carrying will fit in the back 1/3 of the bed behind the fender humps and I have a 2×8 that keeps cargo from sliding forward past where I can reach it. I totally get where you’re coming from. I do miss my 1984 B2000 that I lowered three inches back in 1990. At that height, I could easily reach anything if it slid up against the cab. It had the lift over height of an open car trunk.
“Three words, my friend: Low. Load. Height.”
PREACH!!! I’ve been beating this drum at every turn, and I cannot emphasize enough how much worse trucks are now that they’ve gotten so tall. I test drove a new F-250 a few weeks ago, and without a side step I could barely get up into the stupid thing!
’97 Ranger here, 2.3 5 speed stick, crank windows, 6 ft bed, 1500 lb payload, sliding back window.
Bed height is approx 21 inches, perfect for loading. 1000 pounds of sand will not compress the springs to the stops.
It’s a little wheezy getting up to speed but with a load will Cruise at 70 in fifth gear on flat ground without any trouble. We just got done moving furniture into a new home, yep it took multiple trips but the drive is enjoyable and we got 25-27 mpg for the entire project.
Ford nailed the gearing and cam profile on this one, sucker runs like a watch at 255,000 miles.
You can put a few 10 foot sticks of conduit, 1 x 6 boards, molding or whatever thru the back window and have 6″ space to the windshield, great for short trips to your big box store.
My dad has a 2001, 4cyl, manual, single cab. It has some bigger tires that were on it when he bought it 5 years ago and I think going back to stock will help with highway ramps (in Vegas there’s a lot of raised highways with uphill ramps). Otherwise a great little truck. The biggest issue is that he can’t take it anywhere without someone harassing him to sell it.
People can be so rude.
I would ask him very politely if he wanted to sell it.
Most people are polite. But it gets old when it’s every time he’s at a gas station, supermarket, or Lowe’s.
I get the same thing when I drive my 90 Comanche. So many people offer to buy it.
That’s why I’m hanging on to my ’02 Ranger 3.0 with the 7′ bed. My shoulders are shot and I can’t lift everything chest-high like you need to with the new pickups. Being able to load 8′ pipe, 2×4’s and conduit diagonally and still shut the tailgate is wonderful.
I got 274K on it and just put a new motor in it last year, the 3.Slow inhaled a piece of broken cat and slightly bent #5 valve. I could have just put a head on it – the bore and piston were OK, but it was starting to seep fluids from every seam, so I figured I might as well go all the way.
I’d like to buy a new Maverick Hybrid for the gas mileage, but the tiny bed is a no-go.
The answer is a work van such as the Transit or ProMaster. If you want smaller, the city van serious cannot be beat. The Promaster City was ideal. Low floor, 6 foot ‘bed’, 4 foot load height, 2000 pound tow capacity. And covered to keep your stuff dry. I think the Mercedes Metris is the only left.
But it was a mini-van looking thing that was not cool. A reason you never heard of a BroVan. It was practical with a great personality.
I would love a Ford Transit Custom from the UK. Best of all worlds.
A high top Promaster is so practical. Lower load floors than the RWD vans, good in the snow, great visibility, great turning radius, 6ft tall objects all day and a pallet fits through the side slider to take advantage of the 4,000lb payload. Too bad the drivetrain is so problematic.
When they first started putting folding staircases in truck beds I always saw irony in how they were advertised as a convenience feature when the extra step of deploying the staircase was so much less convenient than just being able to walk right up to the truck and reach in. It’s a solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place and pretending it’s a “feature” or “convenient” is just straight up gaslighting.
Well first off the bed height needs to be determined by what’s a comfortable level for an average person to stand with their arms resting on the top of the bed holding a beer. Next, the ability to load without assistance. Third the ability to get in it without a struggle.
I work at a large hardware store and see this all the time. It’s common to see some poor woman trying to crawl up into a cab that’s way too tall for her while her man hops in and watches.
Awful.
We’ve moved from the top of the bed to the folded-down tailgate being the perfect beer-drinking armrest . . .
In older trucks – pre 90’s I could one step up into the bed. Not possible in most new trucks. The maverick and Cruz are the only ones that come to mind as ‘possible’ but even they are a fairly good step up.
My Super Duty has a bed height of 38-inches, while my OBS F150 is 31-inches. The OBS is far easier to load stuff into the bed.
Think Chevrolet LUV or Izuzu D Max 1 ton as sold in developing countries:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsalexport.com%2Fvehicle%2FR1160089-2022-isuzu-d-max-single-cab-spark-ddi-s-30l-diesel-4wd-mt&psig=AOvVaw02Yn93Tyo0hUc15DCQ2WDa&ust=1741353781071000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBcQjhxqFwoTCJjk38bG9YsDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE
The skyscraper belt lines don’t help with lowering the bed height imo. A lot of modern half ton trucks have belt lines higher than the roof of my car. But now’s a good time to bring back step side beds… err maybe step ladder beds with how high they are off the ground 🙂
Stair side beds?
Maybe even an escalator option for the big ballers 🙂
I think my two Citroën BX Breaks (station wagons) had the best load heights I’ve ever experienced, because you could just drop the hydraulics, and they were already very low anyway:
https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/gallery/CITROEN-BX-Break-803_12.jpg
But I’m quite satisfied with the half metre (20″) floor heigh in the back of my VW T4 Eurovan also 😀
I know neither of them are comparable to pick up trucks, but it’s Europe and it rains or snows sometimes, so we use station wagons and vans 😉
I lowered my Silverado 6 inches and now it’s the appropriate height. Works great to load, drives fine, and yes the 4×4 works ok too. I have airbag helper springs for when I put large loads in the bed or tow the boat. I’ve had people chase me down in the parking lots to ask how I got my truck like that.
I’ve been casually looking for a 2013-15 silverado to use for truck stuff. Single cab, preferably. The ones that keep catching my eye in the thumbnail photos are 2wd trucks. All the 4wd trucks have some bullshit off-road package so the 2wd work trucks must be 3-4″ lower. This might be my bias against mall-crawler vanity pickups, but those single cab low trucks look fantastic.
That generation of truck looks FABULOUS lowered. I’ve seen a couple of crew cab Sierras of that gen running around here, completely stock except for the ride height, one even on stock wheels. And they look SOOOOOO good!
Mine is a 2015 Silverado WT, so it has no offroad stuff. I got the IHC 4/6 lowering kit and now the bed is exactly level with a Home Depot lumber rack, and the roof is same height as a regular Honda CRV. Easy to get in and out, 4×4 works fine, still has average ground clearance. The back wheel gap when stock was insane. I could fit my head between the tire and fender. Now it’s just enough for wheel travel. Few inches.
I’d settle for lower headlight heights.
Serious question, is there a reason they’re higher bed heights today on average than just “high truck looks cooler”?
Doesn’t that give the suspension more room to sag safely when really loaded down?
One thing I’ve heard is that revised SAE towing tests (coupled with generally chasing higher and higher half-ton tow ratings*) 10-15 years ago effectively forced big cooling requirements, which standardized big grilles, and the high belt line just kind of follows from there.
From what I can tell the lowest tow rating on a new F-150 is 7400lb, where 30 years ago, the maximum rating was 7500lb.
I’m going with the switch from drum brakes to disc brakes. Bigger brake rotors = bigger wheels = higher frames = higher bed heights. Not saying that better brakes are a bad thing, especially for towing, but they do come with tradeoffs.
I have the best truck. Toyota T100 2wd (low bed height) 8ft bed. I used an 8ft 2×8 plank (fits in my 8ft bed) to load a motorcycle the other day and the combination of the low load height and the long 8t plank meant that the angle of the plank was pretty flat and super easy to roll a motorcycle up. And the low truck height is good for a million other things too. And even a low truck has more ground clearance than a car, and is tougher so you can take it off road even though it is only 2wd.
That’s excellent!
I did something similar and used 1x4s to put small sides on the ramp (since I was using it solo). It’s a very shallow wooden U-channel. 🙂
Many years back I was going to buy a motorcycle after work and a buddy drove me over in his S-10 so we could load it up (it wasn’t far, but it was February and snowy). The guy selling it was like “i’ve got a long ramp that I use to load it in my truck, with a couple sets of hands we should be able to get it in there”. When we showed up with the S-10 and backed it in the driveway past his F-150, he said “oh, ok”.
We lifted the front wheel of the bike on to the tailgate and then the back wheel on without the ramp. Granted, it was a sub-300lb supermoto, but it was ridiculously easy to load and reverse the process to unload.
Well Mercedes, maybe you could have gone with the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile?
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1786377
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1829185
Amazingly these have a ton weight capacity, also amazing, they were still being built in 1980!
The suspension relies heavily on gummipuffers too.
Thanks, Mercedes!
I can’t imagine trying to use a current model pickup for truck things. Mostly what I picture is the extremely precarious situation of trying to roll a motorcycle or lawn mower up the steep ramp that those high beds require. Ugh. 😐
As the owner of a 3/4 ton pickup I end up using a trailer for most things on wheels because the bed is too tall to safely load stuff into by myself with a set of ramps.
The tailgate is a nice workbench and the height isn’t bad for hauling lumber or landscape materials, but I would still prefer something lower if I could get it. I go off road almost never but I load stuff in the bed nearly every time I use the truck.
Lies, a pallet of headers fell off a dock. Glad it was a f150 not a brat it landed on. Cart bent the tailgate, buried me up to my knees. If it fell farther?
I’ve said this before – how to tell if a ute/pickup in Australia is being used for actual work is the tray being a drop-side/tabletop.
Loading height closer to the magical 36″, full width for loading without wheel wells getting in the way and the ability to add drawers and boxes underneath make it the choice for people who actually do serious work.
Here’s a local tray builder that’s quite popular: https://broncobuilt.com.au/steel-trays/
There’s a nationwide hardware store chain in the US that rents out regular cab Super Duties with beds like this. They’re incredibly useful and allow you to not rely on a truck for moving building or gardening supplies. The flat diamond plate bed is popular in the ag world here, usually with a recessed gooseneck hitch.
Flat beds are popular in the US for farmers or trades like welding. Most forgo having bedsides at all.
Service bodies with the storage built into the bedsides are a popular fleet option.
Reading Truck | Work Trucks & Vans | Upfitting, Services and Equipment
I hate flatbeds with no sides. My ideal is the old VW Bus/Vanagon truck with drop down sides (similar to UTEs), or better yet…a van.
I wonder if you can fit a 5th-wheel or gooseneck hitch to their service bodies? I think that would be ideal compared to a regular pickup bed.
Those ones can’t but ones with shorter bedsides can.
Gooseneck: 98″ x 110″ GNSB Dual Rear Wheel 60″ Chassis Aluminum – ALE Truck Beds
Fifth wheel: Best aluminum hauler bed | utility bed | fifth wheel truck bed
I’ve kinda always thought a bed height 36″ was ideal same as a standard countertop. Low enough to load things high enough to be a works surface.
Ha! I literally just put my 20 gallon compressor in the bed by my damn self just Sunday. Wish there’d been a Maverick back when I bought.
As a short guy with a Maverick, it’s no treat when loading heavy things into the bed either. Last fall I had to take my snowblower for service. 6 foot ramps were pretty steep.