They don’t do 10’ beds at all anymore. The longest is a little over 8’. But some guys have done custom jobs where they take an 8 foot bed, pop the front of it off, and weld a couple feet of another bed on.
Dodge teased a long bed back in the late 2000’s with the Ram BFT (which stands for exactly what you’d think it stands for, so I can’t type it here ) but it was a one-off SEMA show entrant.
I thought the 3800’s had a max 9 foot bed. But if I remember right you could also put 2900 pounds in the thing, which is really good by modern standards. Of course, comparing a 3800 to an F150 is a little unfair, because the 3800 was not the lightest-duty full sized truck they offered unlike the F150. That would have been the 3100. And there was a model in between too. If I’m not mistaken, the 3800 would be more in line with a modern non-diesel F350, both being 2 rungs up the capabilities ladder from the lowest option. And in some configurations the F350 can tow more than 20,000 pounds and haul 7,850 in the bed.
[quote=“shadowfax, post:62, topic:172082”]
But some guys have done custom jobs where they take an 8 foot bed, pop the front of it off, and weld a couple feet of another bed on.
Those 10 foot conversions are a result of someone installing a stock cargo box on a cab-and-chassis truck, those were designed to accept a 10 utility box or flat bed. There is a 2 foot gap between the cab and cargo box that needs to be filled in by extending the bed.
@shadowfax. You may be correct that the bed on the Chevrolet 3800 was 9 feet and not 10 feet. It’s been 45 years since I owned that truck. The Chevrolet pickup series in 1950 was 1/2 ton, 3100; 3/4 ton, 3600; one ton, 3800.
First gear was really low. I always started in second gear.
The six cylinder engines developed full torque at a lower rpm than V-8 engines back in the 1950s and 1960s. The six cylinder engine was more popular in pickup trucks in my area than the V-8 engine for that reason.
At any rate, I am not in the market for a pickup truck. I’ve long since moved out of the country due to time demands of my job. Since I have retired, I have been afflicted with Geezeritis. The main symptom is laziness, so I have no desire to move back to the country. The treatment for Geezeritis is Geritol ®, and Medicare won’t pay for it, so I just sit around being lazy and dreaming about the past.
Pure practicality & utility are no longer safe bets in product success. Things start off that way, then they get embellished and imbued with other signifiers and status markers. As mentioned by Mustangman, that’s where marketing reared it’s head.
If things reduced down to pure utility and rationality rather than the opposite way, then as also mentioned above, we’d all be wearing onesie leisure suits, eating soylent green and there would be no sleeping in, no eating desserts, no alcohol, no vices whatsoever.
Mini vans - we just aren’t made that way.
We still got work vehicles, they usually have a white paint job. If you are looking at used trucks, beware of the white ones, they are almost all retired fleet vehicles.
As I think about it, evolution of pickup trucks from work truck status to stylish appeal may have begun with the 1955 Chevrolet Cameo Carrier. This truck even had carpeting. GMC followed suit with its Suburban pickup. Even before that in 1953, Ford and GMC offered an automatic transmission on pickup trucks.
Maybe some manufacturer’s styling department along with the marketing department will come up with a stylish minivan just as Chevrolet did with its Cameo Carrier in 1955.
@Purebred. Hudson also manufactured a truck on a car chassis back in the 1940s. The Studebaker you pictured and the Hudson were more like the Ford Ranchero. I was thinking about luxury trucks built on truck chassis when I mentioned the Chevrolet Cameo Carrier.
It’s too bad the Studebaker designers are gone. Perhaps these designers could have made the minivan stylish.
In my opinion, the most stylish cars in the 1950s were the Studebakers and the Kaiser’s.
Like this? This was Brooks Stevens’ proposal for a rear-engine Studebaker minivan in the '60s, just before management pulled the plug on the automotive division.
My best recollection of the K cars reliability was the many problems with MAP sensors until an advisory came out with instructions to relocate that sensor and add a few inches of vacuum tube to prevent moisture(condensation) from moving into the MAP.
That car faced the epic of early '80 to mid '90s emissions engineering problems about as well as any make/model but second owners who usually were among the “drive it till it fails then patch it up” culture allowed the car’s image to decline to “beater” status quickly. In my corner of the world mechanics were very slow to cozy up to OHCs, timing belts, FWD and aluminum heads so second owners faced dealership shops or independents who were reluctant to deal with them and they became lepers on car lots.
Brook Stevens had some good styling ideas and some atrocious ideas, as many stylists, that design qualties as atrocious.
Raymond Loewy might have had a good design.
I think that one of his really good styling ideas was the Studebaker Sceptre. It’s a shame that the company couldn’t secure the funds to produce it, as I think it could have saved them. I, for one, would have wanted one.
I think that the passenger side “clean” style was preferable to the alternate one used on the driver’s side, but I would have bought one even if only the driver’s side concept was adopted for the final design.
) but it was a one-off SEMA show entrant.
