
With demand on the wane, I suspect we’re witnessing the final days of the regular-cab short-bed pickup, and that’s kind of a bummer.Buy a New Ram from Dave Warren Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Jamestown, NYĪre you dreaming of new Dodge muscle and sports cars or maybe tackling an adventure behind the wheel of a new Jeep SUV? Or perhaps you dream of new Ram trucks and towing the boat to the cabin or maybe making the school run in the beautiful Chrysler Pacifica minivans. I, for one, love the stubby look of a big truck mated to a short box, but the general buying public doesn’t seem as keen on these fundamentally charming examples of the pickup breed. It’s worth noting that no small/midsize pickup currently available for sale in the U.S.

But, of those, only Ford and Ram offer still offer their regular cabs with a short bed.įurthermore, Ram, which redesigned its pickup for 2019, only offers the regular-cab short-bed combo on the Ram Classic, which is the previous-generation Ram being sold alongside the new truck in Ram showrooms. The 1948 Ford F-1 came with a 6.5-foot cargo box that’s about the same length as the short-bed boxes still available on new regular-cab large pickups.įor 2019, every one of the six brands that sells a full-size pickup except Toyota offers a regular-cab variant. What I didn’t realize was how close to extinct the regular-cab short-bed pickup really is. Further, and I don’t have numbers for this, it seems that most of those trucks came equipped with a long (roughly 8-foot) cargo bed. I did a little poking around and discovered that it was roughly five years ago that regular-cab production slipped to less than ten percent of total large-pickup output. I’ve seen this particular truck again a couple of times since that day-its driver and I seem to share commuting routes-but haven’t seen another regular-cab short-bed truck during that time. It took me a moment to realize that the pickup that had caught my attention was a regular-cab truck with a short bed–something I literally never see anymore. The late-model Ram was normal enough, except for one thing: its tidy, pugilistic stance. I mention the Seven Up bar because, had my friend not reminded me of it, I would never have recalled it on my own.Īnd so it was on a recent commute, when I spotted a pickup truck that seemed completely incongruous on Chicagoland roads. Hygiene was not a priority in those days. Never mind that many hands handled each piece of chocolate before it was ultimately consumed. I wasn’t much of a mint guy, so I could swap that piece of my Seven Up bar for someone else’s coconut chunk, a thing which made me very happy. As the name implied, they had seven sections, each injected with a different filling, and those sections were easy to break off into separate pieces.

Seven Up bars were popular in my neighborhood when I was growing up. Briefly popular, the Seven Up candy bar has been all but forgotten.
