Only 1 Full-Size American Pickup Truck Still Has Rear-Hinged Rear Doors
Not everyone remembers when many pickup trucks had rear-hinged rear doors. But I’ll never forget having to wait in the tiny backseat for the folks in front to open their doors so I could open mine. And I’ll always remember how if your goofball brother slammed the front door closed too early, you might slam the back door on top of it, and it would ricochet off with a CLANG! that made Dad yell. Today’s kids will never understand this struggle…unless their parents drive a Ford F-Series SuperCab. Or even worse, if they’re jammed into the minuscule back seat of the Nissan Titan King Cab. But despite there only being one American and one Japanese full-size truck left with rear-hinged rear doors left, this style may be making a comeback. A surprising concept truck has rear-hinged rear doors.
The Ford truck’s SuperCab is a blast from the past
The Ford F-150 and Super Duty pickup trucks are available in three cab sizes. The “regular” cab has two doors and a single row of seating. The SuperCab has rear-hinged rear doors and a small back seat. The Ford SuperCrew is a full-size four-door cab with more backseat legroom than almost anything in the segment.
So just how big is the back seat in the F-150 SuperCab? Rear seat passengers get 33.5 inches of legroom. This means there’s slightly more room between its front and back seats than in the Toyota Tundra’s Double Cab, which has four front-hinged doors. Passengers in the back seat of the Toyota Double Cab get 33.3 inches of space.
The smaller four-door cabs from GM and Ram (the Double Cab and Quad Cab, respectively) offer a couple more inches of backseat legroom than the Ford SuperCab, but not much. The Ford SuperCrew is a significant upgrade, with 43.6 inches of rear seat legroom. Only the Ram 1500’s Crew Cab outdoes it, with 45.2 inches.
The Nissan Titan’s King Cab is one of the smallest around
One interesting tidbit about the Nissan Titan is that it offers no two-door “regular” cab: every 2023 Titan has two rows of seating. That said, the smaller cab (the confusingly named “King Cab”) with its rear-hinged doors has less backseat leg room than any other full-size truck. It comes in at just 24.8 inches of rear seat legroom.
The larger Nissan Titan cab is the Crew Cab. This upgrade has four front-hinged doors. But with just 38.5 inches of rearseat legroom, it is the smallest in the crew cab class.
Those are the only two full-size production pickup trucks with rear-hinged rear doors. If you want a different truck with rear-hinged doors, for some reason, you’ll have to buy a midsize. Alternatively, you can wait to see if Ram puts its electric Revolution prototype into production.
Ram is bringing rear-hinged pickup truck doors back
In early 2023 Ram rolled out a prototype of its new electric pickup truck: the 2024 Ram 1500 Revolution. The truck featured racecar-like bucket seats mounted to in-floor rails. You can remove these seats and the console to open up the load floor stretching from the tailgate to the firewall.
One way the manufacturer made it easier to remove the seats is with rear-hinged rear doors and a pillarless design. “Doors have been reimagined in a grand saloon style opening that showcases a cavernous occupant space without a B-pillar.” Stellantis. said in the Ram Revolution press release.
A few months after Ram gave us a peak of the Revolution, it announced the watered-down production version: the 2024 Ram 1500 REV. Gone are futuristic features such as the pillarless entry with rear-hinged rear doors. We can only hope Ram someday offers a vehicle this cool as a halo truck, perhaps to replace the TRX.
If they do, I just hope you can open the front and rear doors independently so you don’t have to wait for those annoying front-seat passengers to let you out.
Next, find out the cheapest full-size four-door pickup truck available in 2023 or see a review of a very unique F-150 SuperCab in the video below:
