These Crew Cab Trucks Really Phoned In Their Rear Door Designs And Weird B-Pillars

I haven’t done an installment of our Phoning It In series in a long, long time, and that’s a tragedy. A horrible tragedy on par with getting one’s tongue caught in a fax machine roller. So let’s solve this nightmare right now, and take a look at a really wonderful example of phoning-it-innery, specifically in the world of crew cab pickup trucks.

Crew cab trucks – trucks that have extended cabs with two rows of seats and four doors – have become the default sort of truck on our roads today. Going back to 2020, single cab pickup trucks only represented 3% of sales, and while those numbers have varied a bit, the overwhelming majority of trucks sold now are double cabs. Carmakers have these things dialed in pretty well now, but back about 50 years ago, that was hardly the case.

It’s two of these crew cab pickup trucks that I want to talk about today, because they’re kind of wonderful in their intense awkwardness, and almost all of that awkwardness is focused on the rear doors of these trucks. Well, the rear doors that are actually front doors, forcibly relocated for their new careers, and the resulting strange B-pillars that grew as a result.

I think the best known of these has to be Dodge’s Crew Cab pickups, which didn’t just re-use the front doors, but actually did take the effort and time to cut the doors down a bit, and yet when they did so they still managed to make it look weird and awkward.

The Dodge pickup doors had a curved trailing edge which looked fine on the single cab pickups:

…but when used in a four-door context, everything just gets weird, fast. Dodge cut down the slight angle of the leading edge of the door, but by leaving the trailing edge curved, there’s a deeply strange and thick triangular-ish B-pillar between the doors.

It’s so awkward! And it’s not like they weren’t already modifying doors – so, it would have killed them to maybe make one door that could actually work for both front and rear? It’s not like making crew cab doors was bankrupting other companies – Volkswagen, for example, had been doing it for years:

…though, to be fair, they only had a door on one side, so they had some cost-cutting of their own. And Ford did seem to make custom rear doors that weren’t perfect but at least didn’t look that weird:

Of course, Ford only made these in minuscule numbers, so maybe they’re not the best examples.

Even worse than the Dodge attempt I think was the solution GM used to get crew cab trucks – most of these were actually built by a company in Oklahoma called Scott-BILT, who took brand-new Chevy C20 pickups fresh from the factory and stretched them out by over 42 inches in the cab area, and put in rear doors, like these:

Yes, they’re just the front doors, repeated, and for all the complicated chassis work and body reinforcing you’d think maybe they’d tweak that front angled door edge, but no, this was good enough, somehow.

GM even made a four-door vehicle based on this same platform, the Suburban; why didn’t they adapt the Suburban doors to this? It’s not like these were budget conversions, after all – they weren’t cheap at all. I think Suburban doors could have fit, too; here’s a quick mockup:

I bet they could have even sold back the pickup doors to dealers, as service parts!

Interestingly, when GM redesigned the C20 pickup trucks for the third generation in 1973, they actually did use Suburban doors for their crew cab trucks, as you can see:

This absolutely feels more intentional, and is objectively a better design, but my particular set of Brain Problems makes me sort of miss the awkward awkwardness and awkwardivity of the phoned-in design. Maybe they could have leaned in with a sort of triangular-shaped googie-style trim piece on that huge B-pillar?

I suppose with the low volumes that most of these trucks were built and sold in kind of justify the phoned-initude of it all, but it’s still hard to imagine something so half-assed being sold today. And part of me thinks that’s a shame.