Counting Truck Tailgate Letters Until We Get To The One With The Most

You know what’s an underutilized medium for literature? I mean, other than skywriting? Truck tailgates. Though not normally considered as a viable means for disseminating literature, it must be realized that truck tailgates can hold works of literature, pending that literature is limited to a small number of letters.

So that brings up the question of how many letters can a tailgate reasonably support? To figure this out, let’s walk through some mass-produced examples of truck tailgates (one-off tailgates with paragraphs of Sharpied text that make up someone’s manifesto don’t count) to see what the most letters ever stamped on a tailgate are.

Let’s count them down! Or, more accurately, up! I couldn’t find any examples of a mass-produced truck with one letter on the tailgate, so it looks like we need to start with two. And the source of the two-letter tailgate surprised me:

MG! An MG pickup truck? Thanks to MG now being owned by Chinese carmmaker SAIC, such previously unimaginable things like a huge MG pickup truck are now reality.

Three letters are a lot more common and less jarring than seeing the MG octagon on a pickup. You know this one. GMC!

If you’d like a more obscure three-letter option, may I suggest our Argentinian pal, IES?

Three letters isn’t generally enough for any real literature. What about four?

Oh yes, Ford! Plenty of four-letter tailgates out there. This at least allows for a nice variety of profanity to be stamped onto tailgates, which I think is crucial for any literary medium.

Do we have proof that five letter are possible? We do!

Mazda! A nice five letters. There’s other five-letter options like Dodge and Mazda will have another surprise for us later, so stick around.

For six letters, we have a few options. Nissan, for example. Or, equally famously if not more so, Toyota:

Okay, let’s keep this going! We have six. How about seven? Seven letters! That’s a healthy number of letters, and it’s absolutely been achieved via the tailgate. Like on this Mercury:

We never got Mercury-badged trucks in the US, but in markets like Canada, you could get what were essentially Ford F-100s and F-150s under the Mercury name.

Here’s another seven-letter one:

Hyundai! So much seven in there.

Now eight, eight, I forget what eight was for. Actually, eight letter tailgates are kind of tricky to find. Most of the big eight-letter carmakers – Cadillac, Infiniti, Chrysler – don’t make trucks, and eight-letter carmakers that did, like Borgward, don’t seem to have stamped their names into their tailgates:

I do think there is at least one example, though:

Dodge Ram! That’s eight letters! Plus a space!

What about nine? Nine is easy:

Chevrolet. Nine is a pretty good amount of letters, but can we get to the double digits? Yes we can:

Our old pal Volkswagen! And VW isn’t alone here in the deca-letter club. Look who else boldly stamped ten letters on a tailgate:

I bet we can do even better than 10? One more, can we get at least one more? Hell yeah we can, thanks again to our pals at Mazda:

Sure, it’s more of an admission that the engine under the hood lacks pistons, but it’s stamped into the tailgate, and it’s eleven letters! In two words!

Okay, eleven letters. Can we do any better? Can we hit the magic dozen?

We can. Actually, we can do a baker’s dozen. Behold, the 13 letter tailgate of International.

I think that’s the most ever stamped onto any sort of mass-market tailgate. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, of course, but for the moment I’m calling it at 13 as the most letters proven to be able to be stamped onto a mass-produced tailgate.

So what literature can we cram into 13 letters? I’m sure we can get a short story on there. Like this tale of automotive tragedy:

Key turn, no luck.

Or perhaps something more upbeat about driving:

Top down, speedy!

We can kind of paraphrase that famous and sad six-word short story, kind of:

Buy shoe? Unworn.

That loses some key details, sure, but we’re dealing with tailgates here! I’d love to see your tailgate-capable stories in the comments, though!

(top image source: Deposit Photos)