3 Ways to Make Your Bed Useless

So it's been a while. I've been meaning to post for quite some time, mainly just to stop Zack's nagging, but that's another story... Anyhow, I was looking through my recent photos trying to find inspiration for this post when suddenly it came to me.

What do the following 3 trucks have in common?

Dodge Ram Daytona:

Step-side S-10 with a "tonneau" cover:

Hummer H1 (SUT):

Still thinking about what they have in common? Let's return to the purpose of the truck: to do work. Now, if we agree that a good truck can do good work, then none of these trucks are good. All right, first grade sentences aside, the commonality of these trucks is their lack of a useful bed. The whole point of the pickup truck is the bed. The thing is built around the bed. Without the bed, it would merely be a station wagon or an SUV. Yet these three trucks have been emasculated, castrated for no apparent reason.

Let's look at the Daytona first. More specifically, let's look at that enormous spoiler on its back. Helping to keep those rear wheels on the ground at 150 MPH? Unlikely. Now I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I have seen a Mythbusters episode where they examine the validity of a claim that driving with a tailgate down provides better gas mileage because it is more aerodynamic. The Mythbusters found this claim to be false because of the extremely turbulent flow behind the cab of a truck. So I find it hard to believe that there is a function to a spoiler on a truck. But let us think about the inconvenience that a spoiler causes. Any time you want to get into the bed to load it, you have to go under it, or over it. You must be careful not to scratch it with anything in the bed, so you must tie everything down. It limits bed space like a cap, only it doesn't provide the protection. Essentially, it's pointless. This owner, however, did manage to find a purpose for his emasculated bed:

Yes, that is a stroller. And yes, the man is a U.S. Marine.

But onward to the Chevy S-10. I wish that I could have taken a better picture of this truck, because it's a real winner. I wasn't driving (Editor's Note: this was Jake's first mistake, since the best truck pictures are taken while driving), and when I told the driver to get closer to that truck so that I could take a picture, she (yes, "she" was driving) didn't see a truck. That's because it's a dropped, step-side, regular cab S-10. I know of no smaller truck out there. It's shorter than most sedans. Hell, an El Camino dwarfs this thing! To add to its car-like appearances the owner had added a "tonneau" (I always put this word in quotes because it sounds ridiculously pretentious to say it the way it's meant to be said-- a soft first syllable and a hard second-- very French). Anyhow, this guy turned his already tiny bed into a trunk, and a small one at that. You can buy a sedan with more space in the trunk than this truck has in its bed.

Now you may be curious as to how I can describe a Hummer H1 as emasculated. It's not that the Hummer itself is emasculated, but the bed certainly is. This truck is definitely more SUT than pickup truck, but nonetheless there is a bed here. I am a bit confused as to what one is supposed to do with this bed. There is no tailgate, so anything you put there is going to fall out when you hit the gas on that 6.2 L engine. I think this truck has about the same utility as a Subaru Baja, only it gets a third of the gas mileage. I mean seriously, this truck has about the same capacity (both people and gear) as a Subaru. On second thought, it doesn't. I'm pretty sure that a Baja with a tailgate extender would have more utility than the bed of that Hummer.